Tenkin and Career Management in a Changing Japan

Drawing on the rich, qualitative-interview-based data from Japanese firms and dual-career workers, the author discusses Tenkin, cultural and gendered corporate transfers, workers’ agency, and argues the need to incorporate the concept of care in career management.

---

Tenkin, or corporate transfers in the Japanese contexts, is distinctive by its compulsory nature and embeddedness in society. Tenkin is a mandated practice. Workers have little discretion. If workers are dual-career couples with small children, how do they manage such a mandated employment practice? Tenkin and Career Management in a Changing Japan attempts to answer this question through qualitative interviews with human resource department managers in seven large firms and with 46 married, white-collar workers, including six men, and participant observation in several social events. The research uncovered that the culturally normative, gendered nature of tenkin is produced and reproduced by contemporary Japanese firms’ capitalists’ logic and gendered family assumptions. That said, it also revealed that some firms attempted to advance diversification and inclusion in their workplaces. The dual-career couples are also becoming the actors of tenkin through practices of negotiation in their workplaces and homes. The author discusses that these dual-career couples’ lives echo the concept of agency by Sherry Ortner (2006) and argues that for structural change to happen in Japan, the essential concept of care should be brought to the table in the discussion of career management for all workers.