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2016 MTPC keynote speech
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working styles in which workers engage in work tasks while thinking independently. The
reason why Japanese management attracted so much attention in the West was that, from an
organizational perspective, this was accepted by Western companies as “Japanese wisdom”,
so to speak, for generating large profits from a long-term perspective. Looking at Japanese
management from a different angle, Japanese businesses have in the past exquisitely
incorporated elements of happiness and enjoyment into working life. When one considers
things in terms of their “qualitative dimensions” rather than their “quantitative dimensions”,
one should also be able to consider these forms as one method of achieving balance. In other
words, this is a method for achieving balance between work and life by incorporating
elements of happiness and enjoyment into working life without viewing work as “drudgery”
and “pain”. Unifying and integrating both “work” and “life”, rather than completely
separating the two, is a way of thinking known as “work-life integration”.
3
In this context, Company D’s basic attitude to work design, obtained from the hearings,
that “working is a part of life; it is difficult to draw a line between work and private life since
work is, in other words, a form of play and is synonymous with living”, is extremely
interesting. Company D host events called “After Six Seminars” that provide employees with
an opportunity to interact with and get to know other employees better, as well as learn what
non-work interests and skills they have and are using to enjoy life outside of working hours.
Such opportunities give employees a mutual knowledge and awareness of each other’s
backgrounds, knowledge that can be very useful for employees in understanding each other’s
feelings and perspectives as they perform their work duties. The company is conscious that,
rather than dismissing work as a one-off task, view work as the fruit of individual workers’
diligent effort, which they have poured their energy into, and the result is the realization of
more personal work, and leads to a lower employee turnover rate.
The way of thinking described in Step has not necessarily been sufficiently considered
in work-life balance discussions in the past. Step 2 is an important point in leading
discussions concerning the enhancement of work-life balance towards a realization of a truly
meaningful society, hence it cannot be overlooked. There are also occupations, such as
workers in manufacturing workplaces, for whom it would be difficult to implement Step 2 in
its complete form. However, even for such workers, there is a great difference in the
3 With regard to the concept and definition of work-life integration in Western countries, please refer, for
example, to the following works: Blyton, Blunsdon, Reed, and Dastmalchian (2006) and Lewis and
Cooper (2005).