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working styles and long-term careers. Simply because the system has changed does not mean
that the feelings and working styles of workers can easily change. Today, in an era when only
those companies that have a long-term business vision and strive to secure excellent human
resources survive, management that views workers as merely a cost is doomed to eventually
collapse. Companies must be conscious that workers are the most important management
resource they have in achieving competitive supremacy. This basic concept enables
companies to discover potentially capable workers and introduce employment systems that
also fulfill the various human needs of these workers, firmly establishing them within the
company. With regard to work-life balance, which has been the subject of increasingly lively
debate in recent years, it can be said that we are now about to enter a period during which we
return to the original Japanese point of view. We need to seriously rethink what work-life
balance measures are appropriate in the context of Japan, and what needs to be done from the
perspective of Japanese businesses and the people who work for them.
As mentioned at the beginning of this paper, in the past few years, there has been noisy
debate in Japan about the improvement of work-life balance. The reason that issues related to
work-life balance have become so pertinent is that, when considering the direction of future
development of Japanese society over the long-term, it is imperative to extend the discussion
to include issues that touch on the foundation of social structure. This is the framework that
prescribes the relationship between businesses, which are the basis for productivity, and the
people who work for them. In other words, improving work-life balance is vital to achieving
sustainability for the three actors, namely individuals, businesses, and society.
For individuals, work-life balance is essential for achieving a sense of purpose in life as
well as gradually improving their work skills to achieve better-quality work. For businesses,
as mentioned above, work-life balance is essential for securing outstanding human resources
and establishing them within the company, drawing out and developing workers’ skills, and
raising productivity. In addition, for Japanese society, work-life balance is essential for
promoting better family environments and communities based on good relations between
individuals and businesses, as well as promoting the development and expansion of healthy
local communities in which the children of the future are born and raised. In this way, the
idea that the enhancement of work-life balance is necessary for the development of society
as a whole can be said to be so self-evident as to leave no room for doubt from the long-term
perspective of the sustainability of all of these actors.