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Japanese Firm Denies Punishing Employee for Taking Paternity Leave

Japanese Firm Denies Punishing Employee for Taking Paternity Leave

(Bloomberg) -- Some of Japan’s longest-held workplace norms are coming under scrutiny after the wife of a company worker sparked controversy by tweeting that her husband was punished for taking paternity leave.

Kaneka Corp., a household name in Japan’s chemical industry, is accused of forcing the worker to relocate halfway across the country just days after he returned to work following the birth of his second child.

His wife took to Twitter to complain, saying her husband was being "made an example of" by the company in a series of tweets that went viral this week. Despite recent government attempts to shift attitudes, it’s still uncommon for fathers to take leave in Japan. The worker, a father of two toddlers, quit the company after failing to persuade it to reconsider.

Kaneka denied any wrongdoing in a statement Thursday, saying there’s “absolutely no truth” to accounts on social media that he was forced to quit.

“We believe our handling of the relocation and departure of the former employee was appropriate,” Kaneka said. “We will continue to take the needs of the company and our employees into consideration to achieve work-life balance.”​

Read about another case of alleged childcare leave harassment in Japan

​Relocation is a common practice in Japanese companies, where employees can be shuffled around different parts of the country every few years, sometimes upending families by forcing them to live apart. This practice is known as tanshin funin, in which one partner - usually the husband - lives on their own at the temporary location, while their spouse stays at the family home.

While most companies offer subsidies to help cope with those changes, it can also be viewed as an implicit trade-off for the promise of lifetime employment.

Paternity leave, on the other hand, is still uncommon. Only 6.2% of fathers took time off after the birth of their children, according to a 2018 government survey, despite an official goal to increase it to 13% by 2020.

While the wife, tweeting under the handle @papico2016, didn’t identify Kaneka by name, an ironic reference to the company’s slogan of using science "to make dreams come true" quickly outed Kaneka. The family had recently bought a house, and her husband will now take care of the children while she returns to work from her own leave, she said.

The employee was notified of the relocation three weeks before the move, earlier than most, Kaneka said. "We have many employees who have special family circumstances, including childcare and care-giving duties, and therefore cannot give preferential treatment to people on childcare leave,” it said in a statement.

To contact the reporters on this story: Lily Nonomiya in Tokyo at lnonomiya@bloomberg.net;Shoko Oda in Tokyo at soda13@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kazunori Takada at ktakada17@bloomberg.net, Gearoid Reidy, Sophie Jackman

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