Top 5 Worst Companies in Japan to Work For

As someone who lived in Japan, and worked in bad places, I'll add to the list: Food Factories in general.

I'm surprised Dentsu wasn't mentioned as the worst of the worst. Things described here are not just those companies, but a pretry common thing in a lot of Japanese companies. Because it's not just these companies being bad themselves but its the general issues in the society like vertical hierarchy, extreme bushido loyalty, feel of guilt, gaslighting, mindless following of rules that define any logic and just because it's rules, etc - all that becomes the perfect breeding ground. "ijime" (bullying) is one of the pillars of this society, starting from school and continuing into workplace. You're expected to treat Kohai like slaves when you become the Senpai yourself. Most Japanese never went abroad or experienced working in a different environment, so most don't even realize that something is wrong with their current workplace. This is normal and common knowledge to everyone, unless a foreigner joins the company and points something out. And even then, the foreigner won't be heard, will simply be seen as some crazy guy and will be ignored, like those crazy guys in the streets yelling about incoming apocalypse. Btw, you forgot to mention the みなし残業 (Minashi Zangyo, or Expected Overtime) system. You basically get paid extra 20-30k yen each month regardless if you work overtime or not and are expected to stay overtime on your manager's whim. Most companies have it fixed at 20-40 hours which is written in the job listings when you job hunt. Meaning you are expected to work that amount of hours before you even start getting paid extra for overtime. So if the company has Minashi Zangyo 40 hours you start getting paid after your 41th hour of overtime you did this month. What my genius previous company did is they simply said starting next week we are also working on Saturdays too. Since it was still within those 40 hours of Minashi Zangyo we didn't get paid any extra for Saturdays, because it was already expected from us. It went from "9am-6pm FIVE work days a week" to "9am-6pm SIX work days a week" with a snap of a finger, just like that. For the same monthly salary. The 36協定 (Article 36 Agreement) of 2019 finally forces companies into reducing the overtime hours and forcing workers to take at least 5 days of paid leave every year (nobody ever takes any at all unless they are forced to, or they actually need a day off to go to the ward office, bank, post office, etc, because they all close early), otherwise the companies will be fined by the Labor Standards Inspection Office. But that's the only reason - because they are scared of being fined and because it's the new rule which must be followed. They could care less about their workers suffering health issues from doing overwork. In Japan, if you get sick it's considered to be a weakness and to be only your responsibility, even if it was caused by the workplace stress. Hence why there's no such thing as a "sick leave". Usually every worker has to punch the time card when they start working, when they leave, when they have overtime hours, etc, in a unnecessarily overcomplicated software that looks like it was written in the 90s. But what I've seen some people, especially those in Sales, do is they clock out and then still keep being present at work. The facade of being a busy worker and buttering up to your boss by staying is that much more important in the Japanese society than any actual law. Leave on time and your coworkers and your boss will start to hate you. They may not show it hiding by the polite tatemae mask but expect passive aggressive treatment here and there. They can't easily fire you if your a 正社員 (seishain, regular employee) but they will try to create an environment to make you quit, or simply transfer you across the country, regardless if you have a family you'll be separated from or not. This is too common in jp companies. In some cases they can force you into 休職 (temporary suspension) and reduce your salary down to 60%, or no salary at all, to make you quit on your own. Lots of people are afraid to lose the current "stability" and look for a new job, because you'll have to start your career again from zero basically. Down to being a low class Kohai again and have to grind your buttering up to the new boss again. Job hopping is still very frowned upon and only couple years at a company will look extremely bad on your resume. The salaries are low across the board. Even in IT if you're in the 一般 (general) worker category and not in the management position your salary can be pretty much close to a regular English teacher salary, or even lower. And good luck trying to climb to a higher position when there's so little room for career growth. All your hard work won't be noticed simply because nepotism and because Tanaka licked the boss's bottom cleaner. "Horenso" (report, contact, consult) is business rule/culture of any Japanese workplace and it's elevated almost to a religious status. Everything is built upon reporting on what's going on at the moment. The results of a task aren't that important, but reporting about its ongoing process is VERY important. The boss never checks any tasks they give - you yourself are expected to report about your ongoing task several times a day. On any little change that happens about something. But this isn't just about reporting tasks. If you're in IT and they use work chats like Slack you will be secretly assigned a person to constantly monitor your every move who will keep snitching everything you do to the higher manager in real time. There will be secret meetings held behind your back about what you do. (This behavior is actually pretty common in daily life, when some obaachan calls police on you for "acting suspicious" of just sitting on a bench in the local park). You won't even know about it unless a month or two later you'll receive a letter about "results" of a held meeting regarding your actions. Even if you think it's a perfect workplace, you're happy, everyone is so friendly, you're acing your job, and have no idea you did something wrong. (real example - I opened an official cloud course while looking up stuff which was made like an interactive web page with different animations, and I was snitched on for "playing games at work". The sheer appearance of not being busy at a jp workplace is a big no no. You must always simulate being busy even if you have nothing to do and have to move the mouse and click the screen randomly). As a result. You will be made to write 顛末書 (detailed written report) on what problem you've caused, that you reflected upon yourself, and what will you do in the future to avoid causing any more problems. This will happen every single time they think you did something that they decided to be inappropriate - your colleagues will keep snitching on your right as they're smiling in your face. Even if things aren't stated or defined anywhere in the company rules. If you refuse to write 顛末書 it can be escalated to a termination. Things can go from 0 to 100 in a single day in a jp company. Any non-comformity is heavily hammered down. Any objections/arguments are viewed as excuses. You have no word and must obey. If you're into masochism and like it miserable then the JP workplace is for you.

These companies have the most complaints, not the worst environments. And it's easy to tell: people can't complain when they're dead or over abused. In this top 5 there's none of the main "death by overwork" rankers, like the senior healthcare companies.

Honorable mentions: Bigmotor, for doing all sorts of scummy things to get customers to buy repairs and insurance for cars Japan Beverage - forcing employees to pass a quiz to earn time off and regularly forcing up to 100+ hours of overtime Nijisanji - LOL

Working for Japanese companies is the pits. As an American who worked for Toyota, I’d have to say it was shockingly absurd in illegal labor practices, bullying, nepotism, racism, sexism, etc. Don’t do it.

A friend of mine was an upper engineer in North America Toyota and walked out when he wasn't given a day off when his wife prematurely gave birth to twins. Prior to this he was anti-union but now he works for government. He will never drive a Toyota.

Im japanese. JR is a good company for work actually. Insurance, hotel, news paper, sales agency sectors are terrible.

Im filipino and I have worked with 3 different japanese construction companies namely Sumisetsu Philippines (Sumitomo in Japan), Taisei Qatar, Modair Manila (Tonets in Japan). I can honestly say that the work environment really depends on the management. Japanese people as we know are hard workers but it really depends on the management and the your Japanese superior if they will abuse you or not. P.S. Japanese companies tend to really pay well and are known for being legal in all aspects. They respect the law and they as much as much as possible tend to abide by itt.

This is a significant part of a large picture as to why there’s a declining birth rate in Japan. Overworked and yet still underpaid leads to less time and money for people to even consider starting a family. Japanese people aren’t loners by choice, the work culture made them that way.

None of these really surprise me. Japan has a bunch of problems in work culture and has been stealing some practices from american work culture that makes them worse. Especially contractor culture and retail culture. I will say that JR East surprised me.

Japanese workers especially the blue collar ones suffered the most.And worst of all,they suffered in silence with their lips zipped

Seeing those salarymen all wasted on the train was funny when I first got to japan but it ended up being pretty sad by the end. Makes me really question how bad their work life is, because that's not normal. I remember one guy on the Fukotoshin line, dressed very sharp and had a clean look to him, he boards the train and his eyes can't stay open and he's stumbling around falling on people, the other passengers started pushing him around and eventually he just lied down in front of the train doors all passed out and people were stepping over him. He seemed mentally drained on top of being hammered.

I used to love visiting Yodobashi Camera when I was young. Nowadays, I can only be in there for less than 30 mins before the crowd, loudspeaker, and the THEME SONG drive me crazy.

Honestly the Japanese workers only have themselves to blame. Japan is facing a severe labor shortage, the perfect condition for workers to fight for better rights and pay. Yet due to some misguided notion of “loyalty” this is not happening.

Same applies to American JPN companies

Thanks for making this video, it was informative and concise. I would have liked to learn more about your methodology in ranking the companies, as there might be other factors to consider. For example, larger companies will naturally have more complaints simply due to having more workers, and using a complaints-per-employee metric would help adjust for that. I also worry that some work cultures are so bad that employees fear making a complaint at all, and would never be seen by a monitoring service. I understand that there was limited data to work with for this video, since Alarmbox only showed 3009 complaints over 16k+ companies, not a lot to work with.

This is what is called natural selection. Japan's people work more than almost any country, yet they are falling behind. They are burning through their people until they run out. And a collapse will come. But it is hard to have sympathy despite knowing where it lead.

If JR East workers go on strike, how many weeks would there need to be no train service before management capitulates and reverses the 20% pay cut?

Culture is the #1 problem in Japan. . Creativity is suppressed. It won’t thrive unless the system breaks down as it did after the war or something equivalent happens to society. But having said that the situation elsewhere in the world isn’t that great either due to extreme greed.

Johnny & Associates is also among the worst places to work in Japan. The late founder Johnny Kitagawa had sexually abused hundreds of men from the 1970s to the 2010s. As many as 478 people have accused him of sexual misconduct. Sadly, justice can never be truly served, as Kitagawa died in 2019.