Let’s start with the word itself: “salaryman.” It sounds like a comic book character, a kind of Clark Kent in pleated slacks, whose only superpower is a quiet willingness to disappear. The term, borrowed awkwardly from English and filtered back through Japanese, denotes what’s more formally called a “full-time company employee” (正社員). That doesn’t quite capture it, though. What we’re really talking about is a role, a performance, a life on rails. Roughly a third of Japan’s workforce wears this suit, but its shadow is cast far wider than the number implies.
The script is clear and has been for decades: join a company after college and never leave it. You are folded into the corporate origami sometime in your early twenties and, if you’re lucky—or unlucky, depending on your point of view—you emerge around retirement age, creased but intact. Most of these employees are men. Most of them stay. Most of them don’t ask too many questions.
There are, of course, other roles in the corporate kabuki. Contract workers, who exist on the periphery and can be discarded like toner cartridges. Young women hired into “pink collar” positions, gently pushed toward the off-ramp of marriage and motherhood. But the salaryman is the main character of the Japanese corporate drama. He belongs to the realm of the gleaming megacorp—the Toyota, the Mitsubishi, the Panasonic—where productivity is high, the hours are longer, and the gravity of tradition is inescapable.
This relationship between employee and employer is less of a job offer and more of a blood pact. You give yourself to us, completely and without complaint, and in return we will make sure nothing too unexpected ever happens to you.
The company will own your time, your energy, and, on some level, your identity. Ninety-hour weeks? Not remarkable. Sudden relocation to a remote outpost without your family? The price of doing business. You are molded into whatever shape the company requires—systems engineer, middle manager, spreadsheet whisperer. Your original degree, whether in art history or architecture, is irrelevant. You’ll be trained, assimilated, and kept in motion like a piece in a very large, very polite Rube Goldberg machine.
And in exchange, the company will clothe you—figuratively, but also sometimes literally. It will pay you enough to live a respectable middle-class life. Your kids will attend good schools. Your wife will go to Hawaii once a year with her friends. You will not go, of course. You’ll be working.
Technically, you have between 12 and 18 days off a year. Practically speaking, you’ll use five—sprinkled in single-day increments, often with a kind of guilty discretion. Honeymoon? Two days. Parent dies? Two days. Spouse dies? One day. Take Saturday too, if you must. The company understands. It’s generous that way.
There are some companies that don’t require their salarymen to work on Saturdays. This is seen by others as borderline decadent. Most companies operate on a 2-Saturdays-off-per-month model. Or the ever-popular “you get Sundays!” But if work demands your weekend, then your weekend it shall have.
And of course, there’s the overtime. A lot of it is performative—a ritual of presence rather than productivity. At some companies, you’re paid for it, on a sliding scale that reflects the hour: a little more before dawn, a little more after midnight, and so on. But at many others, overtime is “service.” As in: free. The same word your favorite izakaya might use when they surprise you with a complimentary dish. You put in eight hours of “service” overtime, six nights a week, for a decade or two. Think of it as loyalty expressed through exhaustion.
No one will tell you outright to stay until 3 a.m. It’s just that you’ll find yourself there, as if by instinct. To leave early is to betray your team. To suggest change is to question tradition. Eventually, you won’t need to be told at all. You’ll teach the next generation how to disappear, and you won’t even know you’re doing it.
If you’re single, don’t worry. The company has plans for you. Your boss, in the spirit of paternalistic benevolence, may try to set you up. Maybe with one of the young women in your office—many of whom will quietly exit the workforce once married. And while it would, strictly speaking, be illegal to suggest someone resign because they’re thirty, unmarried, and dating someone outside the firm, well…maybe you misheard. Your ears are tired. It’s late.
The company is your public face. It will negotiate with your landlord, maybe even be your landlord. Need to file government paperwork? HR will do it. Tax season? Don’t worry about it. Insurance? Done. Pensions? Sorted. Immigration? A letter from the CEO is already en route. You won’t even need to sign it.
The company is also your private life. Your friends? Mostly coworkers. Your evenings? Spent with bosses, clients, juniors, or all three—at dinner, at karaoke, on the golf course. The company pays for these, one way or another. Like karaoke? Great. Hate karaoke? Learn to pretend.
When you marry, your boss will deliver the keynote speech at your wedding. When you’re hospitalized, your coworkers will visit. When your parent dies, they’ll organize a collection. If you’re having trouble at home, someone from the office may offer to mediate. After all, this isn’t just a job. It’s a family.
Lifetime employment has eroded a bit since the turn of the millennium. But the idea still holds weight. A salaryman job—often codified as a renewable three-year contract—is, in reality, a lifelong commitment. Promotions are paced out in predictable rhythms. The pay? Modest. Maybe $30k–$60k in Tokyo for a mid-career engineer. In Silicon Valley, that figure would triple, if not more.
But here’s the catch: you don’t quit. Not ever. Mid-career salarymen are about as common as unicorns. Leave your company and you’re a cautionary tale. You might find contract work, but that comes with lower pay, diminished status, and no job security. You’re not just changing jobs. You’re changing caste.
If all of this sounds a little bleak, a little too rigid, a little too much like something out of a dystopian novel written in Excel, well—it kind of is. But it’s also true. I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it. And there are books that unpack it better and more thoroughly than I ever could. If you’re curious, try Sugimoto’s An Introduction to Japanese Society. The salaryman only gets a few chapters. But his shadow is everywhere.
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