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Some Workers in Japan Who Want To Leave Their Jobs Are Paying a Startup To Tell Their Bosses That They Won't Be Back (japantimes.co.jp)
Stressed out, overworked, or just over it: Workers in Japan who want to leave their jobs -- but don't want to face the stress of quitting in person -- are paying a startup called Exit to tell their bosses that they won't be back. Local media reports: "Quitting jobs can be a soul-crushing hassle. We're here to provide a sense of relief by taking on that burden," said Toshiyuki Niino, co-founder of Senshi S, a startup he and childhood friend Yuichiro Okazaki launched last year. The company operates Exit, a service that relays an employee's intention to resign for a fee: $450 for full-time employees and $360 for part-time workers. Repeat clients get a $90 discount. Whether or not people consider that expensive depends on how desperate they are. But if business is any indication, many regard it as a worthy investment for some much-needed peace of mind. In the one year since Niino and Okazaki set up shop, they have mediated the resignations of roughly 700 to 800 clients from across the nation as the number of requests surge. Amid a tight job market and an improving economy, more workers are changing jobs, lured by higher salaries and fewer hours.
Japanese culture is about "duty". Duty to family, duty to workplace, duty to society. It's the key aspect of culture.
It occupies the same cultural primacy slot that is occupied by "individual responsibility" in Western cultures. It's why in Japan, bosses often killed themselves when they had to fire workers. Because bosses had the same duty to those workers as workers had to the company, and by firing them, they failed at the primary cultural tenet. It is the deepest failure one can have. It's one from which you don't come back from. The loss of face due to this is effectively permanent, and in East Asian cultures, face is everything. Even real life performance is less valuable than face.
Same road goes the other way. To quit is a severe cultural infraction, because workers carry the same responsibility of "duty", and to quit the company is to be in dereliction of said duty. It's a loss of face that is permanently on your record, one you don't come back from. Hence the stressfulness of situation where you have to tell your boss you're quitting.
This is slowly changing in Japan, mainly driven by the catastrophic birth rate, which means that capable workers are no longer utterly crippled by quitting their first "real job after the university" for the rest of their career. But just because you remain employable, unlike before, doesn't mean that it's any more culturally acceptable of a situation.