Clad in a dark suit, 38-year-old Masato Yamada goes on a morning commute like most Japanese men his age. Except he has a one-year-old son in the backseat of his car and the first colleagues he greets are mothers bringing their children to nursery school.
Yamada's perspective has changed after doing what was once unthinkable for a Japanese man -- taking paternity leave.
Yamada and his wife Atsuko, 37, are both high-level officials at Japan's trade ministry. When she had twins three years ago, she went on leave.
When they had another child, Yamada decided he should stay at home.
"Because my wife was in a division much busier than I was when she got pregnant, I naturally came to think that it was my turn to take leave," Yamada recalls at a crowded lunch-time cafe as office workers quickly gobble hot dogs and sandwiches.
Faced with one of the world's lowest birth rates, Japan offers generous one-year paid leave for all new parents in the hope of making child-rearing more attractive.
But the incentives are not working. The population last year fell for the first time since World War II. One problem, experts say, is that Japanese men are not pitching in at home as they are expected to be loyal first to the office.
Yamada, who has returned to work but continues to drop his children at school, says he faced a hostile reaction when he told his boss he planned to take paternity leave.
"`Are you serious?' That's what my direct supervisor told me. Although I'd been talking about my plan of taking a paternity leave for almost a year since my wife conceived, he didn't take my words seriously at all," Yamada recalls with a look half amused and half sad.
Domestic helpers are expensive and uncommon in Japan, which strictly controls unskilled foreign labor. Yamada's wife took an obligatory eight weeks off after giving birth but then rushed back to her office.
Disappearing jobs
More than 70 percent of eligible mothers applied for their full year maternity leave in the 2003 fiscal year, although many complain that their jobs disappear once they attempt to return to work.
By contrast, a mere 0.56 percent of fathers applied for paternity leave, according to the labor ministry.
"Maybe it's because a lot of people believe that taking leave could hurt your career in the Japanese working culture where people are expected to show loyalty to one organization in a lifetime-employment system," Yamada says.
"Indeed, after I returned to work in November, some members of parliament who really cared about me came to ask, `Mr. Yamada, are your prospects for promotion all right?'" he says.
After toiling in the cut-throat atmosphere of one of Japan's elite ministries, Yamada thought being a stay-at-home dad would be child's play. Instead, he nearly had a nervous breakdown.
"Despite the fact we already had twins, I had been a workaholic who was ready to work 24 hours a day, a species quite frequently seen in the central government's bureaucracy," he recalls.
"The first two months were mentally tough, terribly so," he says of his paternity leave, during which he was also in charge of taking the twins to and from school.
Every night Yamada had a dream in which he was back in his old element, working furiously in the office.
"And I enjoyed it very much. Then I would wake up in the morning and realize, disappointed, that today was again yet another day of child-rearing," he says.
"I missed having conversations with adults. Furthermore, a baby suddenly does things that are totally impossible to understand," he says.
"At your workplace, even the least competent subordinate can understand your words. My baby doesn't. Child-rearing requires a part of brain cells completely different from that used for working," he says.
But by the sixth month of his child-care leave, Yamada found himself in awe of his son's growth, which was noticeable in little ways every day.
"And I really appreciate that I took the child-rearing leave," Yamada says with confidence.
The experience proved to be a powerful eye opener.
"There are three things that changed me after taking leave. I became more generous, efficient and multi-dimensional," Yamada says.
He became more understanding of his colleagues' failures after dealing with the more severe case of his baby, through whom he witnessed "a lot of unreasonable incidents, such as vomiting all of a sudden."
"And I can concentrate more than before when working as I have a deadline of six o'clock on Wednesdays and Fridays, when I am due to pick up our children at nursery schools," he says.
"Lastly and most importantly," he stresses, "I broadened my perspective through conversations with my mama-friends."
Bosses don't get it
While Yamada's case is unusual, many more Japanese fathers would be willing to stay at home if they were able. A recent government survey showed that only 6.5 percent of fathers who have young children could reduce their working hours as opposed to 29 percent who wished they could do so.
The pressure to put in such long hours comes from the mindset of older Japanese men, who worked around the clock in the years after World War II, taking for granted that housewives would take care of their homes and children, one expert says.
"Through my research I met many fathers who said they were asked by their bosses why they intended to take childcare leave. Mothers are never asked such a question," says Hiroki Sato, a professor of human resources management at the University of Tokyo.
"Bosses just don't understand the lifestyles of their subordinates, whose wives often work full-time as well," he says.
Japan's lifelong employment system has been on the wane, with recession in the 1990s and economic liberalization in the current decade opening the way for job cuts and a surge in temporary or part-time jobs.
But for those who still are part of the employment model, particularly people of higher incomes, the rules have not changed to take into account the increasing presence of women.
The number of women in offices has soared since Japan passed a landmark gender-equality bill in 1986.
Japan enacted a child-rearing leave law in 1992 which was amended in 2001 to ban discrimination against employees who took breaks to raise children, regardless of gender.
The government says job discrimination against people who took leave is a small problem. Only 30 cases were reported in the 2004 fiscal year which were all settled, says Shinichi Kanari, a labor ministry official.
But Masako Atsumi, a lawyer who served on a government panel on equal employment, says the issue is not overt discrimination but corporate culture.
"If you transfer an employee to a lower position right after his or her return from the leave, then the company has no excuse for its discrimination. It's not likely to happen with this strict law on child-rearing," she says.
Peer pressure
"But there is strong peer pressure in the business world which is dominated by men," adds Atsumi, who heads the government-backed Center for the Advancement of Working Women.
When Atsumi attended one conference on job issues in Tokyo, she says she saw a man who took paternity leave be grilled by other male participants.
"It was all men who asked him tough questions, such as how he could catch up after a long break, and how he could cope with both child-rearing and his job," she recalls.
Yamada says he has changed his mind, particularly after spending time with his "mama-friends" -- stay-at-home mothers whose first concerns are their everyday lives.
He and his wife now split tasks, with a schedule for who takes the children to and from their schools where they spend their days.
"Bureaucrats in the central government tend to think that your job is the most important thing in the world," Yamada says at the cafe near his workplace.
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