Every Monday, Katsuyuki Naito rises with the sun, bids his family goodbye and boards the bullet train bound for Tokyo, three hours away.
It's a familiar routine for the 42-year-old engineer with Chubu Electric Power Co. Inc. - and for half a million other "business bachelors" throughout Japan.Naito has been living and working in Tokyo for two years, returning home to his wife and three children in Nagoya on weekends.
Keeping up two households adds 30 percent to his living costs and the separation will likely last another year, but he insists it's all for the best.
"I felt guilty asking them to move with me," says Naito, explaining why he chose to leave his family behind when his job moved to Tokyo.
Naito is part of a growing workplace trend in Japan: employees, almost all of them men, who work too far away from their families to commute home daily. There's even a Japanese term for them - "tanshin funin," or "business bachelors."
Every year in Japan, thousands of workers, typically 40- to 50-year-old white-collar managers, are transferred to new locations. Few take their families with them and fewer still dare to refuse a transfer - a defiant gesture that can lead to dismissal.
The reasons for the frequency of tanshin funin cases in Japan are many and complex. But the main reason is that Japanese society, at least in the eyes of the courts, still deems that family life should take a back seat to the will of companies.
The Tokyo High Court recently backed the right of a company to order an employee to accept a transfer or risk being fired - another in a string of court decisions that have upheld the right of companies to shunt their employees around at will.
Saying no to a transfer is simply not an option in a country where lifetime employment is still the cornerstone of the corporate world.
"Society has not yet matured enough to accept the idea of giving priority to family life," Chief Justice Norio Onodera of the Tokyo High Court said in a ruling last month. "The company has a right to decide a new post without the consent of the individual and have the employee accept it."
Many experts had expected that the rate of tanshin funin would decline when the Japanese economy began to slump in 1991, based on the assumption that less business activity would mean fewer transfers.
Instead, the rate has soared. There are now an estimated 480,000 tanshin funin workers in Japan, up from 200,000 in 1990 and 100,000 a decade ago.
One of the reasons for the steady increase is that transfers have become a convenient way for companies to get rid of or demote unwanted workers, explains Kasakazu Zaizen, a labor lawyer in Osaka.
Companies, still clinging to the lifetime employment system, will offer surplus workers transfers to remote locations, subsidiaries or related companies - sometimes at less pay, he says. In such cases, the hope is that the employee will quit rather than go.
"I've never been able to see why transfers are so important for companies," says Zaizen, who has represented several workers fighting transfers in court. "Companies should be a lot more concerned with people's lives."
Zaizen theorizes that the courts are showing little sympathy for tanshin funin victims, partly because judges tend to be older and more conservative than average Japanese.
Judges are also subject to frequent transfers themselves within Japan's elaborate judicial system, making it awkward for them to chastise companies for doing the same, he says.
The reason few workers take their families with them when they move goes to the very heart of Japanese society, where corporate loyalty, education and home are of paramount importance.
Indeed, Japanese families rarely move - for any reason - once they are settled into their own homes.
It's also a society where relatively few women have careers and where husbands spend extraordinarily long hours at work or commuting, even when they live at home.
Parents worry that moving might jeopardize their children's education, particularly after they've sacrificed so much to get them into good schools.
Others point to the high cost of buying and selling homes, which because of Japanese tax peculiarities, can leave homeowners saddled with a loss even when swapping homes of equal value.
Another frequently cited reason for moving alone is because one spouse, usually the wife, takes care of elderly parents or parents-in-law.
Many Japanese companies insist they don't encourage workers to leave their families. At Chubu Electric, for example, workers have a right to refuse a transfer, says company official Takahiko Sakakiyama, although he acknowledges that workers rarely do.
"The company isn't really supporting tanshin funin," says Sakakiyama, noting that Chubu gives individuals the equivalent of about $200 a month to defray the cost of maintaining two households. "We want people to be with their families."
But in subtle ways, companies do little to make moving easier on families. Chubu, for example, doesn't offer the sort of moving package that is common in North America. Some companies, particularly major banks, provide housing and meals for business bachelors, but not their families.
Nor is there much societal pressure on companies to end the practice, particularly as there is little evidence that tanshmn funin leaves permanent scars on the families of transferees.
Yuhko Tanaka, a psychology professor at the University of Tokyo's Suwa College in Nagano, says business bachelors tend to experience higher stress levels than other workers and their children experience slightly higher delinquency rates. But on the whole, she says, the families survive relatively well.
Critics suggest couples separated by work are more likely to get divorced and to drink and smoke.
But Tanaka, an expert on the psychological effects of tanshin funin, says there's no evidence of this. In fact, she says many couples report that their relationships thrived after they were reunited at the end of the transfer stint.
Many wives also say the absence of their husbands gives them more time for themselves with fewer chores to do.
But this new independence of wives can make "it difficult for husbands who come back and expect life to be the same as what it was when they left," says Tanaka, noting that there have been reports in the media recently about wives complaining about their returning husbands' behavior.
The bottom line is that no one is forcing Japanese workers to leave their families behind, she says.
It's not like the navy, where armed forces personnel may be ordered away on lengthy missions. "In the case of the navy, people are forced to go on their own," Tanaka says. "In Japan, it's by choice so there are fewer psychological problems."
Naito, for one, isn't complaining about his fate. He says the most trying part of living alone is having do to his own laundry.
He even sounds a little relieved that he no longer must bear heavy family responsibilities. "My family used to rely on me more," he says. "Now the children are more grown-up."