The Leave Is Real.The Question Is Whose It Was.

Somewhere in a great many Japanese households there is a woman who left her job around the birth of her first child and has never entirely stopped explaining it to herself. Usually the explanation is about her: she was not tough enough, she did not want it enough, she should have held on. It is a quiet, durable, entirely private verdict, and she has been carrying it for years without once having checked it against anything.

This page checks it. Not with encouragement, which is worth nothing here, but with the two numbers that decide the question — and they turn out not to be about her at all. It also sets out what the leave system in this country actually is, because it is both more generous and more recently changed than almost anybody believes, and because a woman who last looked at it around the birth of a child six years ago is holding a version of it that no longer exists.

Two things it will not do. It will not tell you whether to go back to work, which is not a question anybody can answer from outside a household. And it will not suggest that the woman who left should have stayed — that would be the precise cruelty this page exists to take away, dressed up as information.

The system is four separate things with four separate sources, and the commonest confusion about it is treating it as one. 産前産後休業 comes from labour law. 出産手当金 and 出産育児一時金 come from health insurance. 育児休業 comes from a different statute again. 育児休業給付金 comes from employment insurance. They have different eligibility rules, different money, and different people to ask, which is exactly why a woman asking one department gets told that something does not apply to her when a different department holds it.

産前産後休業 is 労働基準法65条. Six weeks before the expected date on request (fourteen for a multiple pregnancy), and eight weeks after the birth whether she asks or not — the post-natal period is a prohibition on the employer, not a right she has to claim, which is a distinction worth holding on to. After six weeks she may ask to return, and may be assigned suitable work if a doctor certifies no harm. The same article gives her the right to ask to be moved to lighter duties while pregnant, and that clause reappears later on this page in a way she will want to know about.

The money during those weeks is 出産手当金, from her health insurance, at roughly two-thirds of a standard daily wage across forty-two days before the expected date and fifty-six after. Separately, 出産育児一時金 is paid per child toward the cost of the birth itself, and it was raised to five hundred thousand yen in April 2023 from four hundred and twenty thousand — a change recent enough that figures circulating in conversation are often the old one.

Then 育児休業 under the 育児・介護休業法, in principle until the child turns one and extensible to a year and a half or two where a nursery place cannot be found. And 育児休業給付金 from employment insurance during it: sixty-seven per cent of pre-leave wage for the first hundred and eighty days, fifty per cent after. Those two percentages are the numbers everybody quotes, and on their own they are misleading in her favour, which the next section is about.

Two facts sit underneath that figure and neither is advertised. 育児休業給付金 is not taxed. And social insurance contributions — pension and health — are waived during the leave, for the employee and the employer both, without breaking her pension record. So the sixty-seven per cent is sixty-seven per cent of a gross figure, paid without the deductions that were coming out of that gross figure every month before.

Worked from the other end, the usual result is something in the region of eighty per cent of what used to land in her account. Not eighty per cent of her salary — eighty per cent of her take-home. That is a materially different number from the one in her head, and the gap between the two has a cost: it is one of the reasons a household decides, in a fifteen-minute kitchen conversation, that leave is unaffordable.

From April 2025 there is a further layer, and it is the largest single change to this system in years. 出生後休業支援給付金 adds thirteen points on top of the sixty-seven for up to twenty-eight days, taking it to eighty per cent of pre-leave gross — which, untaxed and contribution-free, is about a hundred per cent of former net. The condition is the point of the design: both parents must take at least fourteen days, he within eight weeks of the birth, she within eight weeks of the end of her post-natal leave.

It is worth being exact about what that design is doing, because it is not a gift to mothers. It is a lever aimed at fathers: the government identified money as a stated reason men gave for not taking leave, and priced the answer. A woman reading this should understand the mechanism she is inside — the most generous window in the whole system opens only if somebody else also takes leave, which makes a decision that used to be hers alone into a household negotiation with a number attached to it. That can be useful. It can also be one more thing she has to ask for.

Here is the finding this page exists for. Among women who gave birth between 2015 and 2019, the proportion still in work afterwards was 69.1 per cent for those in 正規職員 employment, and 25.2 per cent for those in パート or 派遣 work. Same country, same statute, same leave system, same years. Two populations with entirely different outcomes, separated by a line that was drawn before anybody was pregnant.

The headline number that circulates — about seventy per cent of Japanese women now stay in work across a first birth, up from around forty per cent a decade and a half earlier — is an average of those two. It is quoted as progress, and it is progress. It is also the kind of average that describes nobody: a woman is in one category or the other, and the average sits in a gap between them where no actual person lives.

Which puts the private verdict in a different light, and this is the whole of the reframe. A woman who left work around a first birth and has read it for years as insufficient determination was, with high probability, in the second category. Her leave rights on paper may have been thinner, her employer smaller and without a precedent, her contract finite, her nursery application weaker for exactly the working hours her contract gave her. Three-quarters of the women beside her left too. Determination was not the variable; the variable was a contract type, and she did not choose it under conditions anybody would call free.

This is not an argument that nothing was in her hands, and it would be dishonest to pretend a statistic dissolves a life. Individual women in the second category did stay, and their reasons were their own. The claim is narrower and it is the only one the evidence supports: the outcome was strongly predicted by something she was assigned rather than something she was. A verdict built on the assumption that it was the other way round is a verdict built on a factual error, and it can be put down on those grounds rather than on the grounds of being kind to herself — which, in this library’s experience, is a thing women find much easier to do.

The 男女雇用機会均等法 makes disadvantageous treatment on grounds of pregnancy, childbirth or taking the leave attached to them unlawful — dismissal, demotion, a pay cut, a forced change of contract type. Since 2017 employers have carried a positive duty to take measures against pregnancy- and childcare-related harassment, under both 均等法 and the 育児・介護休業法, which means a consultation route and a prohibition on detrimental treatment of the person who uses it. As with 職場 harassment generally, the framing is the useful part: these are duties on the employer, not favours she is applying for.

Then there is one decision that changes the shape of a specific, extremely common situation, and it is badly known outside employment law. In 広島中央保健生活協同組合事件, decided by the First Petty Bench of the Supreme Court on 23 October 2014, a physiotherapist asked for the lighter duties that 労基法65条3項 entitles her to while pregnant, and was relieved of her 副主任 position on the occasion of the transfer — and was still not reinstated after her childcare leave ended.

The Court held that where an employer demotes a pregnant worker on the occasion of that lighter-duties transfer, it is in principle a breach of 均等法9条3項 — a mandatory provision, so the demotion is void. The exceptions are narrow and the employer has to establish them: that she agreed on the basis of her own free will with adequate information, or that special circumstances made not demoting her genuinely difficult. The default, in other words, points the other way from the one every workplace instinct suggests.

The practical value of knowing this is not that a woman should litigate, which is expensive, slow and a life decision of its own. It is that a great many women have been told a version of "we moved you because you asked to be moved" and have accepted it as the natural consequence of having asked. Knowing that the law’s starting point is the opposite changes what can be said in a room, and it changes what a free consultation is likely to tell her. It is a point of law and it is dated; where it applies to a particular set of facts is decided by a lawyer or a labour bureau, not by a page.

A woman whose children are in primary school last read this system around the time of a birth, and the version she is holding is genuinely out of date. 産後パパ育休 — four weeks within the first eight, splittable in two, separate from ordinary 育児休業 — did not exist before October 2022. The April 2025 supplement described above did not exist. Nor did 育児時短就業給付, which pays ten per cent of wage to a parent working shortened hours for a child under two, and which is the first piece of this system that reaches past the leave into the return.

And from October 2025 the 育児・介護休業法 requires an employer, for a child between three and school age, to put in place at least two measures from a set of five — shortened hours, flexitime or staggered start, telework, childcare support such as a subsidised sitter arrangement, or additional leave. Two of five is not everything. It is, however, a legal floor where there was previously a conversation with a manager, and floors are what can be pointed at.

The behavioural numbers moved too, and faster than anybody expected. Men taking childcare leave went from 30.1 per cent to 40.5 per cent in a single year — the 2024 figure from the ministry’s 雇用均等基本調査, the first time it has passed four in ten, and roughly a fivefold rise across a handful of years. Among men who started leave, about sixty per cent used 産後パパ育休 specifically, which suggests the 2022 instrument did most of the work. The figure for women in the same survey was 86.6 per cent.

Before that forty per cent gets used as an answer in an argument at home, it is worth being precise about what it counts. It counts people who took leave at all. It does not count weeks. A man who took five days and a man who took eight months appear identically in it, and for most of the period during which that number was climbing, the commonest male leave in Japan was measured in days rather than months.

So the honest reading of a rising rate is that a barrier moved, not that a load was shared. What became possible was asking, and asking without it being strange, which is not nothing and is not the thing. Where this lands practically is that a household looking at the April 2025 supplement is looking at a fourteen-day condition, and fourteen days is inside the range that the rate has historically been made of. The supplement makes those two weeks cheap. It does not make them long.

The counter-reading deserves its full strength, and it is this: barriers moving is how these things actually change, and it is condescending to wave away a fivefold rise because the average duration is short. A father who takes two weeks at the birth of a first child has done something his own father did not do, in a workplace where the precedent now exists for the man after him. Both readings are true. Only one of them is any use in deciding what to ask for this time, which is why this page gives you the duration question rather than the rate.

Almost everything written about this subject stops at the leave. The leave is the part with forms, and the part employers have policies about, and the part that felt, at the time, like the hard bit. The part that decides the next fifteen years is the return, and it is largely unwritten because it consists of nothing that can be pointed at.

The shape of it is familiar to anybody who has lived it. She comes back on shortened hours, which is her right and which she is glad of. The work that goes to people who are reliably present at six o’clock stops coming to her. The assignments she gets are the ones that can be handed over at four. Nobody demotes her, nobody says anything, and by the time her hours are full again the person who was junior to her is running the thing she used to run. If she raises it she is told, accurately, that nothing was done to her.

Two things are worth saying about that, and neither is a solution. The first is that it is a known pattern with a known cause rather than a private misfortune: assignment follows availability, availability is read as commitment, and commitment is what promotion is scored on. Nobody has to intend anything. The second is that 育児時短就業給付, from April 2025, is the first piece of public money in this system that attaches to the shortened-hours period rather than the leave — which is an official acknowledgement, in the only language a system speaks, that the return is where the cost is.

And the belief sitting underneath the whole of it has a name in this country, which is worth knowing because a named belief can be argued with and an unnamed one cannot. The 三歳児神話 holds that a child must be raised at home by its own mother until three or something is irrecoverably lost. It shapes how leave is taken, how nursery places are argued about, and how a mother returning at eleven months is looked at in a waiting room. This library has a whole essay on the person who is also a mother, and it is the right next page for a reader for whom that last sentence landed.

If there is a single practical instruction on this page it is this, and it is deliberately small. Find out — before you need it, while nothing is at stake and asking costs nothing — what your employer’s 就業規則 actually says about 育児休業 and 短時間勤務, and whether your own contract type is inside or outside it. Not what a colleague believes. Not what a manager said in a corridor. The written rules, which an employer is obliged to make available to its workers.

The reason it is worth doing early is the same reason the record mattered on another page in this chamber: the answer you get when nothing is riding on it is a different answer from the one you get when everybody in the room knows why you are asking. Asking in February about a policy is an ordinary question. Asking in the week you tell them is a disclosure.

Where to ask, all free and none of them us. 雇用環境・均等部 or 均等室 at each prefectural labour bureau handles 均等法 matters specifically, including pregnancy-related disadvantageous treatment, and can contact an employer. 総合労働相談コーナー at the same bureaus takes any workplace question from anyone, with no requirement to have raised it internally first. ハローワーク administers 育児休業給付金 and can say what you are eligible for. And the 労働基準監督署 is the place for 労基法65条 itself — the leave the employer may not refuse.

Nothing on this page is anything we sell, and our position is short enough to state without decoration. We are a paid intimacy service. We are not an employment lawyer, not a labour bureau, and not a childcare arrangement, and an hour here does not move a single one of the things described above. Every route named in the previous section is free and exists for exactly this. A woman deciding between spending money here and spending an afternoon at a 均等室 should spend the afternoon.

There is one thing to name rather than leave implied, because women do arrive here from exactly this stretch of life. A woman who has spent several years being available to a household at all hours, and being read at work as the person who leaves at four, can lose track of what it is like to be somewhere as herself rather than as a function. An hour in which nothing is being extracted from her is not a career intervention and does not pretend to be. What it sometimes returns is smaller and worth naming accurately: the difference between resting and being off-duty.

So, the two things to take. The system is real, it is more generous than the figure in your head, and the most recent additions to it — a supplement that takes the first weeks to roughly full net pay, a payment attached to shortened hours, a floor of two flexible measures for a child up to school age — all arrived within the last four years and are not in the version most people are carrying.

And the other one, which is the reason this page was written rather than a leaflet. If you left work around a birth and have been quietly holding it against yourself since, the number that matters is not seventy per cent. It is the pair underneath it: 69.1 and 25.2. Look at which of those two you were standing in, and then decide whether the verdict you have been carrying was ever about you at all.