Are you working remotely for a Japanese company? What happens if your company suddenly issues a return-to-office mandate?
Will you have to move back to Tokyo? What if remote work is in your contract—do you have the right to refuse to return to the office? What standing do you have to negotiate with your company? What are your chances of persuading management to change their minds?
These are the questions TokyoDev set out to answer, because return-to-office mandates are on the rise in Japan.
Return-to-office mandates: the numbers
The TokyoDev 2024 survey showed that, among respondents, only 9% worked five days a week in the office. However, companies are increasingly switching from fully-remote to a hybrid working pattern. In 2023, 43% of survey-takers could work fully remotely if they wished, but in 2024, only 38% could say the same.
This trend is not confined to Japan. According to Morgan McKinley, in Hong Kong 91% of companies insisted their employees return to the office, while only around 40% of companies in the UK and Canada are asking the same. Japanese companies come in around the middle, with 62% requesting that their employees come back into the office at least some days.
49% of survey-takers valued the ability to work remotely over everything else. Meanwhile, those who had to attend an office were more negative about their workplace in every aspect except job security than those who could work fully remotely.
In short, tech companies in Japan should be advised that insisting on in-office work, or even hybrid work, could strongly affect their recruitment and retention of employees. By contrast, those who allow fully-remote work can expect to see a rise in applications.
What the Tokyo Labor Bureau has to say
For those developers whose companies issue a return-to-office mandate, what are their rights under Japanese law? And what is the experience like for those developers who try to enlist the help of Japan’s foreign worker resource centers?
To find out, I called them myself. Each time I represented myself as a developer dealing with an increasingly typical situation: though I had always worked remotely, and had moved to a distant prefecture while doing so, I was suddenly being ordered to report to the Tokyo office once a week. What could I do about it?
Labor Standards Advice Hotline
I started by calling this hotline, which quickly set me up with an interpreter. With each question she listened to me in English, then spoke to her superiors in Japanese and translated their reply back to me.
However, they did tell me that most of my case depended on the exact wording of my contract. If it was specified in my contract that I could work fully remotely, regardless of changes in the company’s work plans, then I had a good chance of insisting on continuing to do so—or, at the very least, negotiating from a position of strength. If, however, my contract said that I could work remotely with the company’s permission, or contingent upon company circumstances, then my only hope was to ask for some kind of compromise.
If remote work was specified in my contract, I was told, and the company continued to insist that I come to the Tokyo office when I already lived in another prefecture, then I could be eligible for leave allowance, or a payment of 60% of my salary. They weren’t able to give further details on the subject, however, and again directed me to one of the labor bureaus for more details.
The Tokyo Labor Bureau
When I rang the Tokyo Labor Bureau and presented them with the same dilemma, it was easy to locate someone who spoke English, but their answers were less optimistic. Essentially, the woman on the phone said, there was no provision for return-to-office mandates—-or indeed, anything about remote work—in Japanese law. This left me with limited options.
In general, while certainly willing to help, she didn’t seem too optimistic about my chances of pushing back against the company’s order. It would be “kind of hard,” she admitted.
Since this was more about my particular contract than general labor law, she also suggested that this was really a matter for the lawyers, and gave me the number for the Foreign Residents Support Center.
The Foreign Residents Support Center
When I first called the center, their lawyer was busy, but the woman on the phone apologized profusely and asked if they could call me back, which they did within a few hours.
The lawyer I spoke to had yet another set of suggestions for my return-to-office scenario, but of the people I’d asked so far, he seemed the most optimistic regarding my chances. Unfortunately, it seems that hard-and-fast answers are difficult to come by.
If there is some rational reason for the once-a-week visit to the office, he went on, then the company would be obligated to pay my commuting costs from the distant prefecture to the Tokyo office. However, like me, he considered it unlikely that the weekly meeting was really all that necessary. Instead, he thought I could press for doing the meeting via video call, and that this would fulfill my obligation to the company without incurring additional hassle or expense for either side.
The tricky part was that all of this was speculative, and a lot would depend on specific qualifications. For example, when discussing whether the return-to-office order was actually illegal, he said it depended on several different factors:
- Was fully-remote work promised in my contract?
- Could my job be done fully remotely?
- Does the company have an important reason for this order?
Of course, the last question is the hardest to nail down. The company has to compare the necessity of the order to the disadvantage of the employee, I was told, which appears to leave a lot of legal wiggle room for a strict or unscrupulous company. And contrary to what the Labor Standards Advice Hotline had suggested, he did not think I would be eligible for leave allowance.
If the company refused to budge, he said I should contact my local bar association or city hall to find representation. If I was unable to locate a lawyer on my own, I was free to call back and they would assist me again.
Given my specific circumstances, he suggested that if the company covered the commuting costs, I could perhaps offer to return to the office once every two weeks. In general, he assured me that I shouldn’t be afraid to bargain in this way, particularly if I worked for a small company that might find me difficult to replace.
A less positive experience
Sadly, sometimes neither negotiation nor legal action are possible. Several TokyoDev members spoke anonymously on their companies’ return-to-office mandates, and one of them described his own experience in consulting a lawyer.
It was a lawyer [where] you get 30 minutes of pre-consultation. I sent him my job description, my contract and stuff, and then he looked it up. He said that even though it’s written in the contract that remote work is possible, there’s no precedent in the Supreme Court. . . . He said that if you want to fight, of course I can help you fight it. But in the end, if you lose or if the company dismisses you in the middle of it, then you have bigger problems.
Although the opportunity for remote work had been promised in his job description, the actual employment contracts were more vague in their terms. Technically, the company wasn’t violating the contracts. Employees suspected that the company was using this return-to-office mandate to reduce their workforce without violating Japanese employment laws, but such an assertion would be difficult to prove.
In the end, the developer decided against legal action. “I did not try to lawyer my way through because I know, once I file a lawsuit or something like that, then it’s going to be big trouble for me.” He is, however, actively searching for a new role, as were other developers we spoke to who had been ordered back to the office.
To be clear about the prospect of retaliation, Japan law is strict about the circumstances under which an employee can be terminated. An employee negotiating in good faith around remote work isn’t an acceptable reason, and would run afoul of Japanese law:
An employer is only allowed to dismiss an employee if there are objectively reasonable grounds for dismissal, and dismissal is deemed to be appropriate in light of socially accepted ideas. Furthermore, all possible grounds for dismissal must be clearly stated in the work rules if the dismissal of an employee is to be valid.
The union option
To Dennis Tesolat, General Secretary at the General Union, the solution to these return-to-office mandates is obvious. He calls it “union math.”
If tech workers were to get together, they could command a lot at the negotiation table.
I met with both Tesolat and Sonomi Terao, the Executive Officer at the General Union. They believe most developers don’t consider unionizing because they’re office workers rather than in the trades, but they are in a great situation to do so. “There’s power in numbers,” Tesolat said, “but [also] just one person joining can be effective.”
The General Union, which is headquartered in Osaka but accepts members from all over Japan, already has at least one worker dealing with an unwanted return-to-office mandate. They wouldn’t mind taking on more such cases.
Companies don’t want to fight, they want to make money. But we’re a union, it’s our job, so we don’t mind.
In fact, Tesolat said, sometimes zero confrontation is required. Just sending in the notification of an employee’s General Union membership often causes management to back off their demands.
“At least somebody else now is watching you,” said Tesolat. “Is it a big help, is it going to change your whole situation? No, but they might leave you alone.”
And if they don’t, “You just have more options [with a union]. The chance to negotiate, to be supported by colleagues, the right to dispute. The option of court is always there, but it’s not the first option. Nine out of ten times we solve things without using that court option.”
What’s key, he said, is not approaching the negotiating table alone. “Dispute and negotiating—that’s our job. . . . And once you [mess] it up, we can’t help you at that point.” This is especially true if you’re an international developer working for a Japanese company, “because the whole manner of negotiation is different. . . . The chance for a lot of misunderstanding is there.”
That’s the thing about negotiating on your own. It’s hard, you don’t always know what to do it . . . and if there’s retaliation from that, ‘So what?’ But if the union does it, and there’s retaliation, there’s trade union law that says you can’t do that.
What about retaliation for joining a union? Tesolat laughed and said that in his thirty years of experience, he’s seen fewer than ten straightforward retaliation cases. That leaves open the possibility of indirect retaliation, but Tesolat again pointed out that the union exists to deal with precisely that sort of issue.
In short, “I would worry about a lot of other things before I’d worry about joining a union.”
Two years ago, the General Union didn’t even have an IT branch. During the pandemic, however, the General Union—which had initially confined its membership to the Kansai area—began accepting applications from all over Japan, and from a greater variety of professions.
“People were getting fired, they weren’t getting paid, and we couldn’t say no,” Tesolat said, “so we opened the door.” As a result, membership shot up by 35%.
Recently, they’ve seen another surge in tech worker applications: “A lot of people started getting scared after the layoffs in America.” With return-to-office mandates increasing, the General Union may see their numbers continue to rise—and that’s good for “union math.”
How to reverse your company’s return-to-office policy
One anonymous developer we spoke to successfully reversed the return-to-office policy for his entire team.
During Covid, he told us, the team worked fully remotely, but after the pandemic was over the management team insisted that developers return to the office five days a week. Eventually our interviewee was able to persuade them to restore remote work, first on a hybrid basis, and later full-time.
“This was at a very small company though,” he explained, “where we had more leverage than what you would normally expect in a midsize or big company. Since the push also came from me as the lead developer, management eventually accepted it.”
“I was the first developer in the company,” he added, “and I was often asked about what we needed to do to get a dev department running.
“One of the things I mentioned is that it is hard to keep developers for a long time, so you need incentives. You either give them a raise, or benefits, or both. Since it was a small company it had no way to compete with bigger ones when it came to benefits and salary. So, what else can you do? If you are small and agile, you can afford to give remote work benefits, as it will cost you little or nothing to do so.”
From the company’s perspective, my point was more about being able to retain people and also have an easier time finding new ones. The cost of hiring and onboarding a new developer is quite high in my experience. If you have a good worker and you are not in a position to be giving raises to everyone, remote work is an easy way to keep your devs happy. The fact that other companies do not offer it also means that it is harder for them to be poached.
I asked if he had any advice for other developers who wanted remote work. “If I were to give any tips to other developers that are unhappy with their situation,” he said, “it would be to let their company know about it.
“For example, they probably have a one-on-one discussion with their manager every so often. This is a good opportunity to ask if the company is considering remote work, [explain] why they want it, and so on. I would not expect a change immediately, especially if they are in a more traditional Japanese company. But consistently asking about it and showing that it really matters is what made the devs here get remote work.
”[Ask the company to] try running a trial with just one developer or two, and evaluate the pros and cons. If the company outright states that it will never allow it no matter what, or it becomes clear that they will not do it, I would start looking for new opportunities that provide the benefit.”
So, it is always about leverage. If the company does not think you are worth what you are asking, your only choice is to go to a place that thinks you are worth it. And, of course, keep studying and learning to improve the chances of someone thinking that you are.
Conclusion
In the TokyoDev 2024 survey, there’s a clear correlation between in-office work and job-hunting. Full-time office workers are looking for new opportunities at the highest rate, followed by hybrid workers, whereas only 10% of fully-remote workers are looking for new roles. As more companies become aware of how highly their employees prioritize remote work, we should expect to see a decline in return-to-office mandates.
Even those who don’t wish to change jobs may be able to use this trend to negotiate with their companies. Of course, not all of those negotiations will be successful, and the advice offered by Japanese labor bureaus and legal support centers can be highly variable. However, most of the people I contacted were supportive and helpful. Perhaps, if you encounter negativity or opposition from government workers, you should avail yourself of the old immigration tactic: if you don’t like the answer you got, ask someone else.
Has your company asked you to return to the office? We have a list of fully remote developer jobs for you.
If you want to continue the conversation, join our Discord community.
.png)
