Japan is still suffering from the catastrophe, the government still promotes to save the electricity as much as possible. As one of the solution, the government now encourages Japanese salarymen to work from home. For many of you, this might be a smashing news, even some already grab his bag and a half way out of the office. On the contrary, it´s not so good news for Japanese salarymen (サラリーマン), but why?

This is the first series of four which was a feature of JB Press a little ago.

Japanese salarymen have fear of  ¨working from home¨

A man in his 30´s to 40´s is strolling in the neignbourhood during the weekday is really strange, looks quite suspicious. If he bumps into someone he knows, even more complicated. They probably think that he´s been laid off because of the recession (Risutora / リストラ in Japanese).

This behaviour is the main issue which stops Japanese people work from home. ¨I can´t even go out to get lunch because I get worried about how they see me¨ says a man smiling wryly, who works from home twice a week.

It used to be more complicated to work from home for the matter of security as they needed to take documents out of the office.

However nowadays, most of work can be done with the computer unless you work in the factory. I mean, more work cannot be done without computer. This means that as long as there is the internet connection, we can work anywere. As the security system is improving, with an appropriate measure, it doens´t matter if you work in the office or in your house.

Despite of this technological advantage, working from home doesn’t seem to spread between Japanese salarymen.  

Working from home is also known as “tele-work” and there is even “Japan tele-work association” has been established in Japan. And according to a survey of this association in 2009, more than 68.3% of Japanese companies didn’t apply tele-work system. Only 18.6% of the companies had introduced “mobile work”, means they allow the workers to work from outside only when they are seeing clients or during the business trip.  The companies promoted working from home was just 4.8%.

It’s been two years since this survey was taken, although I don’t see much change until now. 

I would be the first one hopping out the office to home and there, I probably with my computer working all day in my pyjama Tshirt and my hair sticking up. How wonderful it would be working in a beach like this and still get paid.

The next articule will tell us the actual situation of working from home among bigger Japanese enterprises.

To be continued.

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