On a heaving weekend afternoon in early January, a large truck plastered with the image of a bow-tied albatross wearing a top hat rumbles through the glare and glamour of Tokyo’s Shibuya district.
A pounding bassline, an insistent jingle and a singsong schoolgirl voice chant into the mill of millennial and Generation Z Japanese who have come here to shop, eat, mingle and mooch.
“Enough is enough! You only live once! I can’t leave. I want to leave!”
This is quiet quitting, at top volume. The truck stops at traffic lights as its central pitch — to some a message of subversion, to others of salvation — reaches a climax.
“Resignation . . . Amazing!”
Many younger Japanese already know what the truck is advertising: a taishoku daikou service where you pay a proxy to resign on your behalf. The service, pioneered around a decade ago but expanded since the pandemic, is of a type that is reckoned to be used by thousands of people across the country every year. Prices vary but in this case, for a flat fee of ¥22,000 ($147), an agent will make the call and handle the paperwork so you don’t have to.
“Could I just resign and save myself the money? I could, but this was so much easier,” says one 35-year-old resident of Yokohama who used an agency to resign from the taxi company he worked for until last November. “I could just switch off and not worry.”
Two days before the truck’s January visit to Shibuya, the company advertising on its side, Albatross, said it had resigned on behalf of more than 60 full-time employees and a dozen part-timers. Other agencies say they handle several hundred cases each month. Albatross, through its adverts, is probably the most prominent player, but there are others such as EXIT and Watashi NEXT that have barged into the public consciousness.
“It’s interesting how things have evolved over the past two years or so,” says one Tokyo-based agent. “More and more companies are less surprised when they receive a call from an agent representing one of their employees. They’ve moved from demanding to speak to the employee, which we of course decline, to asking what the grievance had been. It’s become more normal.”
The resignation agencies have emerged to some extent as a direct answer to the intricacies of Japanese tradition and social conventions — the performative modes of address, hierarchy and other issues that younger generations increasingly find intolerable.
The pitch is broadly similar: they offer to handle communications with the employer, the blowback, the return of company property and any paperwork or financial issues outstanding. Employers may often claim they have a right to a significant notice period, says the manager of one agency: the reality is that the combination of unclaimed leave, overtime and Japanese law are strongly on the side of the employee.
But it is here that the proxy agencies themselves are vulnerable to the suggestion that they are operating in a grey area. Behind the flashiness and the offer of a quick fix is a murky industry that some suspect is ripe for a crackdown.
The sector has fierce critics, including lawyers who accuse some agencies of exploiting customers and exceeding their authority. One employment lawyer described the activities of the dozens of agencies currently operating in Japan as the “predictable rule-breaking” of an industry in its infancy.
Online chatter suggests that, rather than the effortless break they have paid for, some customers have ended up with greater headaches by engaging a proxy. And as the agencies’ numbers have swollen, so have the concerns that, in their offer to handle everything, the proxies are taking on more responsibility than they are legally entitled to.
A former public prosecutor told me that he believes at least 18 resignation agencies around Japan have acted outside their proper legal authority. The issue is also on the radar of the powerful Tokyo Bar Association.
A crackdown on the proxies may indeed be imminent and could threaten plenty with extinction, say people close to the Ministry of Justice, who add that they are waiting to see if a critical mass of dissatisfied customers has yet emerged.
For all the potential legal challenges, both the existence of resignation agencies and the demand that keeps them in business is fascinating. Because there is more to these services than just convenience and expediency. Behind the slogans, a new normal of worker power has been developing, undermining decades of convention and forcing companies into a rethink of how to attract and retain staff in a tight labour market.
The fundamental drivers extend far beyond Japan. Many countries are experiencing a generational shift in attitudes towards work, the desirability of face-to-face communication and the calculus of what the workplace and worker owe each other. The same generations also live in permanent, pushy proximity to the question of how much life can and should be led online.
Even so, younger Japanese have a distinctive wall of cultural rigidities to push against. Japanese companies, say sociologists, have for many years exploited their ability to make employees feel guilty about letting the company or colleagues down. That has contributed, they add, to a range of workplace issues, including notoriously long hours and instances of karoshi, death by overwork. It is the fear of being made to feel guilty, says the founder of an agency based in western Japan, that causes so many people initially to put off resigning, and then to turn to the resignation agencies as a way through that.
They could in theory just resign for themselves, but the forces of social awkwardness are formidable. They might be confronted by bosses begging them to stay “just until this project is done”, or by snarls that they are putting the company and colleagues in a difficult situation. Many say they simply cannot be bothered to go through the process of answering the question “why are you leaving?”, often because the truthful answer would involve a catalogue of ways in which the company was a bad employer.
Many customers — about half are in their twenties and thirties, according to the employment-focused research group Mynavi — describe an intense relief from handing over to a proxy. Maho, a proxy user now working as an estate agent in Yokohama, says: “The whole reason I wanted to leave was because my boss was constantly yelling at every small mistake. And that was when I was trying to do everything right. The idea of saying I wanted to resign was too scary. I wanted to quit within a month of joining the company but I made it to nearly nine months before using a proxy. The service cost the same as two tickets to Tokyo Disney, but it made me feel so good.”
Several of the proxy agencies describe themselves as a new, vital piece of social and economic infrastructure. Others privately suspect that, even without a crackdown by the authorities, they are a temporary phenomenon, and that once Japan is over its resignation angst and the labour market becomes more liquid, demand will evaporate.
In October, Mynavi published the results of a survey of 1,600 HR personnel at Japanese companies, as well as 800 male and female employees aged in their twenties to fifties, which found that, in 2023, almost 17 per cent of people who changed jobs used a proxy agent to resign.
Just over 23 per cent of companies surveyed said they had experienced staff resigning via an agency. About 40 per cent of employees said that their main reason for using a proxy service was either because they had been barred from leaving or because they feared that happening.
And in the almost three years since Japan emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic to find attitudes towards work had shifted, the proxy agencies have tried hard to present themselves as mainstream. More and more of them highlight their affiliation with unions, and many are attached to lawyers or small law firms.
By last November, Albatross was forced to admit that the proxy game had reached an unexpected zenith. Some months earlier, the company had been hired to resign on behalf of a woman who later went to work for Albatross as a resignation agent. Albatross was then contacted by another proxy service informing it that she was now quitting Albatross.
Put it all together — the reasons people quit and the reactions — and the resignation agencies are positioned in the middle of a very big process of change for Japan itself, says one proxy agent.
“We get so many requests from people who have wrestled with resigning but cannot resolve it on their own,” says Megumi Nishiyama, who works at an Osaka-based agency and has carried out about 500 resignations in the past year. “You are supposed to be able to resign when you want, but the reality is harassment, difficulty speaking up and pressure to treat the bosses’ word as absolute. As Japanese, there is stress associated with resignation. We smooth that out, by acting as an intermediary.”
Daisuke Kanama, an economist at Kanazawa University who last year published The Quietly Quitting Youth, devotes a chapter to the phenomenon of proxy resignation services and the effect it is having on companies as they begin to sweat: their entire employee retention strategies have been based on the misapprehension that they had the formula about right because people were staying.
The proxy resignation agents are rapidly demonstrating not only that the companies do not have the formula right, but that many are quite vulnerable to a sudden exodus of labour when a cheap, frictionless exit is on offer.
“It’s difficult, even in academic conferences, to explain the Japanese temperament to people overseas,” says Kanama. “It’s hard to generalise, but if you go back to the root of it all, what Japanese people feel is a burdensome cost of communication. The cost of simply saying you want to quit is high . . . I think Japanese people are inherently bad at communication. And if the social costs of communication are heavy, you can see that ¥20,000 or ¥30,000 as an alternative is really, really cheap. It’s good value.”
The concept of hiring proxies to smooth over any number of awkward, embarrassing or burdensome social situations has been floating around Japan for some time. A few entrepreneurs have claimed to run extensive proxy services providing stand-in family members — fake husbands to appear alongside single mothers at school events, or fake parents who can impress the parents of a future spouse on a first meeting — but evidence for their actual use is slim.
The founder of one resignation agency says that he has looked into the possibility of launching a proxy service to handle relationship break-ups: the initial call or text to say it is over, the collection of possessions from the other person’s flat and the warning against further attempts at contact. “It’s a work in progress. It’s not clear it would work,” he says.
Proxy grave visits are real and, in one case, are offered by a listed company which recognises that people attach importance to — and will pay ¥20,000 for — the idea that a living being has visited (and scrubbed and weeded) a grave, even if the surviving relatives are unable to make the journey themselves.
But in terms of their power to disrupt, the resignation services appear to be making the most difference to traditional patterns. At one level, the resignation proxies make their fortunes meeting a practical need at a perfectly pitched price: cheap enough, because of the competition between rival agencies, for almost anyone to consider it worth the money for the avoidance of an awkward conversation. Efforts by employers to dissuade would-be quitters are intensified when, in a labour market now feeling the strain of real shortages, a single resignation can hit a small or even medium-sized business hard.
Japan’s population is declining fast. In the 12 months to October 1 2023, the number of Japanese nationals fell by 837,000 — the biggest number since comparable records began in 1950. It is also ageing fast: the Baby Boomers are retiring and, from this year, almost 30 per cent of the population will be over 65. Women and older people have joined the workforce in larger numbers in recent years, but it is proving tough to offset the decline in labour-intensive industries such as hospitality, construction and transportation.
At another level, the proxies owe their existence to something more subtle. Japan’s notoriously illiquid job market, where historically many people have expected to work for a single company for much of their lives, is starting to free up in unexpected ways as younger generations eschew the “endure everything” ethos that underpinned their parents’ employee-employer relationships, or decide that the company they chose is not offering the opportunities for growth or responsibility it originally claimed.
The varieties of exploitation, overwork, sexual harassment and bullying that pervade many Japanese companies are less likely to be concealed in the social media age. At the same time, the generation that now feels it cannot put up with those issues is allergic to head-on confrontation.
“I know that older Japanese people look down on my generation and say we aren’t tough enough,” says Kei, a graduate who joined a large food company but resigned by proxy after months of what he claims were repeated instances of casual bullying. “But when I first joined a big company as a graduate, I realised that Japanese people have been grinning and bearing it through unacceptable situations. I knew I wanted to leave pretty quickly, even though I had worked hard for the place and I didn’t want to go through the process of being told I was ungrateful by quitting. Japan makes a lot of life convenient, and is always looking for ways to smooth things. I think proxy resignation is just another example of that.”
Masahiro Yamada, an expert in the sociology of emotions at Chūō University, suggests that the use of proxy resignation services, and specifically the act of paying money to avoid confrontation, unwanted suasion and criticism, are a direct consequence of the way social norms have been formed. Japan is not monotheistic, he says, but has evolved a strong sense of community and collectivism. “To maintain your own self-image in that environment, you cannot give too much away and you avoid embarrassment or criticism.”
All this has coincided, argues Kanama, with the long-term effects of low birth rates and the inexorable demographic change eroding Japan’s cohort of young people. Japanese companies, he says, are best thought of as structured on a membership system: supported by a constant flow of young people at the bottom on the understanding that they will remain members for a long time and absolve the company from the need to engage in a lot of risky, expensive mid-career hiring.
That model, says Kanama, is no longer sustainable because there are simply fewer young people to provide the flow. “The value of young people in Japan is increasing sharply, but companies are not doing anything to change the old system. Young people suddenly find themselves in a strong position and I think this is creating a huge strain,” he says.
Back at Albatross, founder Shinji Tanimoto argues that the proxy agencies are triggering a long-overdue clean-up of subpar companies and dismal workplace conditions. “In Japan today, quitting is seen as a bad thing. Now, if we use resignation agents . . . changing jobs will become a normal part of the culture,” he says. “It will take time, but if there were no resignation agents now, the bad companies would survive. To destroy really bad companies, the best way is to get everyone to quit.”
Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief
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