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TOKYO—Yuta Sakamoto was exhausted from selling home-improvement projects, including the boss’s demand that he help clean up at renovation sites on weekends. One day, he mustered his courage and announced he wanted to quit. But his boss warned him he would be ruining his future, and Sakamoto shrank back.
Then a friend proposed a solution. Sakamoto didn’t have to confront the boss again—he could hire someone to do it for him. After sending $200 and his case details to a quitting agency, he was finally a free man.
“I would have been mentally broken if I had continued,” says Sakamoto, 24, who found a new job as a salesman at a printing firm.
A labor shortage in Japan means underpaid or overworked employees have other options nowadays. The problem: this famously polite country has a lot of people who hate confrontation. Some worry they’ll cause a disruption by leaving, or they dread the idea of co-workers gossiping about what just transpired in the boss’s office.
Enter a company called Exit. Toshiyuki Niino co-founded it to help people quit after experiencing his own difficulties leaving jobs. “Americans may be surprised, but I was too shy or too scared to say what I think,” says Niino, 34. “Japanese are not educated to debate and express opinions.”
Exit now handles more than 10,000 cases a year in which its staff quits on behalf of clients. Many competitors have emerged, bearing names such as Mo Muri—“I can’t do it anymore”—or Yametara Eenen, which asks, “why don’t you quit?” in the dialect of Osaka, where people are known for being more self-assertive than in Tokyo.
Trying to outpace the competition, Exit offers 50% off for repeat customers—“as many times as you like.” Mo Muri recently started advertising on subways and promises customers help landing a new job.
Others focus on niches. One law firm offers to help military officers quit for about $400. That is pricier than other services, but the firm suggests having a lawyer handle the matter will foster peace of mind.
With 2.7% unemployment and a fast-aging population, Japan faces a labor squeeze. Teikoku Databank, a Tokyo research firm, says staff shortage is the most common reason cited for business troubles, and a record 313 companies went bankrupt in the fiscal year ending in March because of it.
Wages are rising and finally began to outpace inflation this summer, but many companies can’t or won’t pay enough to retain workers. A generation gap leads some older managers to expect workers to display absolute loyalty to the company.
Koichi Oda, 39, spent eight years as a forklift driver in a western Japan warehouse. He says he resented his boss’s coercive manner, the low pay and lack of air conditioning. Some temp workers suffered heat stroke in the summer and had to be taken away by ambulance, he recalls. Oda expressed his contempt by having an agency quit for him.
“This was my way of conveying a message: ‘You colleagues aren’t worth saying goodbye to,’” he says.
As success stories of quitting via agencies proliferate, Japanese who can’t afford such services are getting creative.
One X user posted, “I had no money to spend on a resignation agency, so I pretended to be an agent and called in my resignation.”
Labor-starved managers, meanwhile, are contacting quitting agencies wondering if they have any recent quitters to recommend. Kaoru Yoshida, a Tokyo staffing-agency manager, says such outreach has yielded several leads for her company.
Yoshida says she was willing to work with quitting agencies to find workers—even though her own company has received about 10 calls from a quitting service.
Shinji Tanimoto is chief executive of Albatross, which runs the “I can’t do it anymore” service. He says company managers seek his advice on worker retention.
It isn’t complicated, he explains: Overbearing bosses, unpaid overtime and a refusal to let people use their vacation time drive employees out the door. “We know the reasons.”
Ayumi Sekine, 24, recently joined Albatross, where she calls companies to quit on clients’ behalf.
Her routine is fairly straightforward. Sekine phones employers, informs them she is with the “I can’t do it anymore” service, and declares that her client will be leaving. She specifies the departure date and potential use of remaining paid holidays for notice periods.
(Japanese employees, like Americans, typically give notice before quitting. Clients who turn to quitting agencies have often tried this path and faced resistance.)
Sekine also instructs employers not to contact the worker further and nails down departure details, such as how to return a laptop or uniform. Most employers accept the resignation, but about 10% require negotiation with a lawyer brought in at additional expense, according to Tanimoto, Albatross’s chief executive.
Sekine gravitated to this profession after four years at a gas company where she received few pay raises—even though she considered herself among the best performers.
Her resignation was accepted, she says, only after she cried and begged her boss following three weeks of meetings where managers tried to stop her. “I really realized then how stressful resignation was.”
Sekine says she enjoys the collaborative atmosphere at her current job. And should the job get overwhelming, there is an additional perk, as pointed out by Tanimoto, her boss.
“If someone here wants to quit,” he says, “I won’t stop them.”
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