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The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted labor markets around the world. Workers and corporations scrambled to adjust their workstyles to a new normal, by avoiding the commute and working remotely from their homes or elsewhere. Japan is a country that stood out for its inability to adjust to the remote work environment. Comparative statistics show that Japan reported the lowest number of people engaged in remote work among the OECD countries, as well as the lowest percentage of corporations that offered remote work policies. In this article, I investigate why telework in Japan is difficult. The lack of telework in Japan may seem paradoxical, given the country's reputation for being technologically advanced. I argue that it is not the technological infrastructure that is lacking in the Japanese workplace, but distinct features of work embedded in Japanese culture and its collectivist roots that prevent the effective implementation of telework. I rely on recently published data from various sources, and apply key sociological theories such as implicit contracts, gift exchange, dramaturgy, and impression management to substantiate my main arguments. The paper concludes by drawing on implications for the future of work in Japan.

Gender inequality in educational attainment remains a salient feature of contemporary Japanese society. This inequality lies not at the high school level but at the university level. Equal numbers of men and women advance to high school, but a significantly lower proportion of women advance to four-year universities relative to men. Starting from government statistics which report that Japanese parents aspire to university education more for their sons than for their daughters, I argue that the gender gap in the university advancement rate in Japan stems in part from differences in how parents allocate resources within the household depending on the gender of their children. From the individuals' perspective, the gender composition of their siblings should therefore alter the ways in which resources are allocated to them. Using a 1995 cross-sectional sample of men and women between the ages of 20 and 70 in Japan, I test the null hypothesis that the marginal rate of substitution (MRS) between an additional brother versus an additional sister with respect to the probability that an individual advances to university or not is equal to unity, i.e. MRS = 1 implies that brothers and sisters are perfectly substitutable and that parents allocate resources equally amongst their sons and daughters. My results show that the null hypothesis is rejected for women but cannot be rejected for men: It is not sibship size per se that depresses women's likelihood of university advancement, but the number of brothers in the household. My findings lend support to the position that intra-household resources in Japan are likely to be allocated in favor of sons and away from daughters.

Abstract  This paper examines several foreseeable scenarios about the effects of information technology on the labor market and the process of individual's income attainment. While I do not intend to exclude other factors, I argue that computer literacy and information literacy are two distinct but complimentary factors, and that they will be the two critical issues in determining the productive capacities of workers in the multimedia age. I view information literacy as a firm‐specific skill, and argue that it will be the key factor in determining the production function of workers within the firm. Computer literacy is viewed as the endowment of information literacy skills. Workers with higher levels of computer literacy will be at an advantage at the time of labor market entry. Further, such workers are more likely to have higher rates of return on firm's investments in information literacy skills. thereby yielding higher productions. Based on the premise that information technology and labor are complementary components which should reveal an increase in the demand for higher skilled workers, I suggest that income differences are likely to widen along the lines of educational attainment and establishment‐size. The "Implications" section (V) of the paper examines several issues for further research in this incipient field of sociology.

This study examines the extent and causes of inequalities in information technology (IT) ownership and use between natives and immigrants in the U.S., focusing on the role of English ability. The results indicate that, during the period 1997-2003, immigrants were significantly less likely to have access to or use a computer and the Internet. Moreover, the gap in IT usage widened during that period. Immigrants (and natives) who live in Spanish-speaking households are less likely than individuals living in English-speaking households to have access to or use IT. Estimates using a measure of predicted English ability show that English ability is positively associated with IT access and use. The results suggest that much of the immigrant-native gap in IT usage is attributable to differences in English ability. -- Information technology ; immigrants ; English ability

This paper uses identical surveys conducted in July 2020 in eight countries – U.S., U.K., Germany, Italy, Sweden, China, South Korea, and Japan – and examines teleworking within and across these eight countries. We seek to answer the following questions: (1) Which demographic and socioeconomic groups are more likely to telework? (2) Is there any association between telework and other work-related experiences such as life satisfaction and perceived productivity at work? Across countries, we observe that teleworking was higher in countries that imposed strict lockdowns, such as China, and lower in countries that had soft lockdowns, such as Japan. Within each country, there are notable differences in teleworking between low- and high-income persons, and between those employed in small versus large firms. We also find that people who used telework before COVID-19 report higher life satisfaction compared to those who started using telework for the first time after the COVID-19 outbreak.