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Mizuho Financial Group Inc has opened an in-house day-care facility at its head office in Tokyo's Chiyoda Ward. Through the facility, the company aims to establish a working environment where female workers can balance work and child rearing.
Children of employees of six group companies, including Mizuho Bank, Mizuho Corporate Bank and Mizuho Securities Co, will be eligible to use it.
An outside company will operate the center on behalf of Mizuho Financial. The facility, which can be used just for one day with advance reservations, will care for up to 25 preschool children aged six years old or younger between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. The new day-care facility is Mizuho Financial Group's second, following one that opened in June last year at its training center in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo.
© JCN
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tkoind2
Good for them! It is about time Japanese business joined the 21st century.
medievaltimes
Give credit where credit is due. Good move Mizuho.
boonme
As the J population continues to age and shrink you will see an increase in daycare centres. Everyone will have to work or hire more foreigners. Probably a bit of both.
They need to allow men use of the facility as well and whats with the one day policy? I guess it is to give grandma and grandpa one weekday off nappy duty.
Well I suppose it is a start in the right direction.
irabujapanu
now all the mothers can work 24 X 7 and dont need to go home to look after their kids..
kirakira25
IF anyone from Mizuho is reading this, I am so impressed I would consider moving my business to Mizuho just to show my support for a company taking this excellent intelligent and long overdue move. As a working mum of two kids I know how hard it is when the company you work for doesn`t offer any understanding or support at all.
However - if I am reading this correctly - if you have to book a day in advance and have no guarantee of having childcare available, it kind of makes it difficult to work at all anyway, at least in any meaningful non-temp kind of work. So that does kind of defeat the objective of it all. If the idea is to provide respite for granny`s or other babysitters - yeah, not a bad idea, but still not incredibly helpful. Nonetheless a good start.
Latenights
Sorry, I don't see this as either a good start or a step in the right direction. It's just enough for the Mizuho PR team to appear to be taking positive action, but not enough to actually provide ongoing, reliable support to working parents. The article here doesn't specify if "one day" means "every Tuesday" or "one day whenever your name reaches the top of the waiting list". This system doesn't appear to offer any kind of continuity for a working mother to hold down a regular job for any length of time. My other beef is that it is for the benefit of female employees: i.e. working fathers need no support because they have wives at home to raise their kids. This project does not treat employees as part of a family unit. Imagine, for example, a male employee whose wife has recently given birth to a second or third child, might that family not benefit from the eldest child entering day care at the father's workplace to 1) meet and mix with other children before starting school, and 2) allow the stay-at-home mother to cope better with her new baby? This project looks good on paper, but it fails to meet the real-life needs of working parents and it relieves Mizuho of any obligation to take further action. Nice try, but I'm not buying it.