After joining Delta Kogyo in 1996, I worked designing seats for automobiles, then analyzing product durability, till I came to work in the ICT Promotion Section, where I am involved in setting up a company IT environment and promoting the digitization of our business. At home I live with my wife and three children. My eldest son is at junior high school and my other two sons are at elementary school. My wife continues to do research on support for people with disabilities in employment.

I and my wife have worked full-time since we got married, but as I wanted children, so I avowed to take childcare leave when we have children. When we had our first and second sons, I used the company’s childcare leave system and dedicated myself to raising the kids for one year after they were born(2005 to 2006 and 2007 to 2008). During that time, I started by learning how to dissolve frozen mother’s milk and then I learned how to burp a child and make baby food - things that I thought I would never learn. I then started to know instinctively when they were hungry and needed the toilet as if I were “a mother who knows best!”. At the same time, I kept an eye on my career by getting my co-workers to update me about things at work and studying for work qualifications during my childcare leave, so I was able to return to work without any problems.

However, when my childcare leave expired and I returned to work, this did not spell the end of my child-rearing duties. Children get fevers or injure themselves irrespective of whether I have something on at work such as an important meeting, and I would get requests from the nursery school to come and collect them on such occasions. Even now that they have reached elementary school and junior high school ages, there are times when I have to leave work early due to something like a sudden injury, and I’m still required to take part in school activities such as PTA and events. After returning to work, I was worried about not being able to give 100% to both my job and child-rearing. However, the company recommended using the short working hours system and legal holiday time for child-rearing, and both my superiors and colleagues were cooperative. As a result, I am able even now to be fully involved in child-rearing thanks to these systems. I feel that I have acquired the ability to do my work more efficiently in a limited time period and to organize my work so that I can get someone to cover for me at short notice.

Speaking from my own experience, I feel that both tangible support in the way of company systems, and intangible support, such as cooperative superiors and colleague who enable such systems to be used care-free, are required to balance work and child-rearing. In my case it was child-rearing, but each and every worker has his/her own situations such as caring for someone or carrying out lifework. In order to fully balance life and work, it is necessary for work colleagues to understand each other’s situations and for the company itself to actively provide support. I believe that all students look first at jobs they want to do when job-hunting, but how about also focusing on the working environment of a company, such as its work leave systems, qualification acquisition systems, and whether that company will provide comprehensive life support. Work is just one aspect of your life.

Published in "Follow your own path" (2019-2022)
Affiliation, job title, etc. are as of the publication of the 2019 edition of "Follow your own path".