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Paper short abstract

Why do Japan’s company transfers persist? Transfers signal male promotion, while women absorb mobility costs via unpaid care. Surveys and interviews suggest that transfer households sustain a modern-family model, prolonging Japan’s transfer regime and slowing progress on gender equality.

Paper long abstract

In Japan, company-ordered relocations (tenkin) are widely associated with regular employment. Firms exercise broad personnel authority, making transfer timing and destination hard to predict, while refusal is institutionally and normatively difficult. This transfer regime consolidated as a private-sector employment practice during Japan’s postwar high-growth era, beginning in the 1950s.

Since the early 2000s, reforms to this regime have been debated, but substantive changes in practice became more visible mainly after the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the transfer regime remains widespread across firms, suggesting that key drivers of its persistence have not been fully addressed.

Drawing on Marxist feminist debates, I conceptualize the tenkin regime as a homosocial “men selecting men” mechanism: willingness to relocate signals suitability for promotion and higher pay within core regular tracks. Crucially, however, this regime has been sustained by a gendered division of labor. As men’s careers are organized around mobility, women disproportionately absorb the social-reproductive costs through unpaid housework and care and the reorganization of everyday life, thereby enabling transfers and helping reproduce the regime over time.

Until around the 1980s, transfers were largely assigned to male regular employees and family accompaniment was common, supported by standardized company housing (shataku). From the 1980s onward, children’s schooling increasingly constrained moves and solo transfers (tanshin funin) spread; after the 1990s, the contraction of company housing further normalized solo arrangements.

Using fertility behavior since the 1990s as a lens, this presentation asks whether households embedded in the transfer regime still reproduce a gendered modern-family model or are shifting toward mobility–fertility tensions reported in dual-earner contexts.

Empirically, I analyze two surveys (2016: 3,000 married women whose husbands are regular employees; 2018: 3,000 regular employees, women and men) and 22 in-depth interviews (2022–2024) with transferees and spouses. I argue that, although destabilizing factors have emerged since the 1990s, fertility among transfer households appears relatively maintained, helping to prolong Japan’s transfer regime and delay progress on gender equality; I close with implications for redesigning mobility-related support as dual-earner careers expand.

Keywords: tenkin (company-ordered relocation); tanshin funin (solo transfer); transfer regime; gendered division of labor; company housing (shataku); regular employment