With staff pay raises on hold and semi-annual bonuses shrinking or nonexistent, several major corporations from last year began notifying workers at their factories that job rules banning moonlighting would no longer be enforced.
Holding down a side job may be permitted by one's employer, but that doesn't necessarily make things easier, reports Nikkan Gendai (June 29).
Take Mr Fujii, age 43. The consulting firm were he works had permitted moonlighting by employees in the past, but until the "Lehman Shock" in 2008, he'd been fully occupied, and never gave any thought to a second job. That changed from early 2009, when the volume of work suddenly plummeted.
"Actually, for some time, I'd been wanting to do 'real business,'" said Fujii. "I'd always been interested in collecting Japanese accessories, so I started up an online shop selling lacquerware produced by a master craftsman that a friend of mine introduced. The orders began flowing in right away, but..."
With sales soaring, Fujii's new operation was featured in the news, and became the envy of his peers at work, even to the point that someone remarked, "Anybody who doesn't moonlight is a fool."
To meet the growing demand, Fujii urged the lacquerware master to churn out more merchandise, and as an incentive, offered a bigger cut from sales.
"But my offer only served to infuriate him, and his reaction was to start up his own website. The customers all moved there," moans Fujii. "To add insult to injury, word got around at my regular job that I wasn't any good at business, and I lost my clients' confidence."
A 39-year-old man named Fukuda, employed by an electronics manufacturer, found himself victimized by a type of swindle that targets "drop shippers."
"I registered for retail sales on the web even without any inventory (referred to as a drop shipping operation)," he relates. "The system calls for buying goods in consignments of 100,000 yen as a startup. It's set up so that when you get an order from the customer, the seller handles everything, including shipping to the customer.
"I began getting a steady stream of orders, and things were really looking up, but then I began getting swamped with claims from customers who said they never received the goods. Some even accused me of fraud!"
Realizing he'd been conned, Fukuda initiated legal action against his supplier, but the court costs eventually wound up costing him 200,000 yen more than the amount awarded him.
"The kind of moonlighting in which you wind up being made a fool of is undesirable; the same goes the type that comes to a tragic end," advises business journalist Noboru Kurihara. "Ideally, a side job should inspire a positive attitude that makes you think, I'm a good 'multitasking player who isn't completely attached to my main work or my part-time job.'
"The ability to excel at several things is good for one's self esteem," adds Kurihara. "It's about learning to develop nimble footwork."
In a sidebar, Nikkan Gendai notes that a survey by E-Career, a job-recruiting site operated by SoftBank Human Capital Corp, found that average monthly income from moonlighting was 47,037 yen. About 75% of regular company staff who sought outside sources of income did so via foreign exchange dealing or net auctions.
© Japan Today
17 Comments
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Canukle
These men are idiots.
sakurala
It doesn't seem to me that one salary can actually supply for families anymore and men are struggling to cope with their changing role.I know men want to feel like the provider in a family and thus may be pressured into moonlighting, but it seems to me that their wives could think about pitching in with part-time jobs. But that's just an idea...and it really depends on what the needs are of the indidividuals (Louis Vuitton is not a necessisty in my opinion)
TumbleDry
I'll show my moon for money.
thepro
Way to interview the two biggest fools this side of Shimbashi
marushka
agreed, these men are stupid, feel sorry for them
Frungy
I think people are missing the point. The message here seems to be that employers want to have their cake and eat it. They want to cut pay and keep employees 'on the books' by encouraging them to moonlight to make up the extra pay. Sorry, but that's not on. Someone is either employed and earns a living wage, or they're unemployed and free to find a new job or focus all their attention on starting a business properly rather than dividing their focus between their "job" (which doesn't pay enough to support them) and their new business. Starting a new business is a full-time job, not a hobby.
What's even worse is that employers are offering the illusion of choice. In actual fact most of them will still expect and pressure employees to work unpaid overtime and "be a team player" by working late. This is pure snake oil selling by the employers and it's dishonest and despicable. The employer is trying to convince employees that they're giving the employees something, whereas all they're giving them is less pay for the same work, and the opportunity to maybe spend their precious leisure time doing more work for less pay for another company. Pull the other one Japanese Companies, it has bells on it.
Sarge
Seems like Fujii and his lacquerware master friend weren't such good friends after all.
samuraisam
Frungy is completely correct. However, the two are still idots. if i ever did that, i'd probably end up throwing myself in front of a train or something.
soundhack
I'm not sure why people are calling these men fools. How would you do things differently? For the the first guy, should he have not offered a bigger cut but asked the maker to make more goods anyway? Should he have not asked for increased production?
The the other guy I guess was careless and didn't do due diligence, but there are plenty of ways for scam artists to appear to be actual companies.
lovejapan21
i agree soundhack...anybody, no matter how street smart you think you are, can get conned, soo it is not their fault at all. Some people are more gullible than others, it does not make them fools. Just trusting. And thats fine!
Klein2
"I'm not sure why people are calling these men fools. How would you do things differently?"
Most people would not, would they? This is why a few people have all the money and the rest of the world sits around scratching their heads.
Frungy
soundhack - I agree that the man dealing with the lacquerwork master wasn't a fool, but he was dealing with an artist and in my experience artists are tempermental at the best of times and need to be handled with a lot of care. Offering him money to rush out more goods ... well, that wasn't sensitive to the artist's sense of pride in his work. Raising the price (while honoring orders already made at the old price) would have lowered demand, increased his profit margin, made the artist feel his work was being priced appropriately and being regarded as a work of art rather than a cheap commodity, etc. Later the entrepreneur could have presented the artist with an appropriate gift (I'd suggest a cash bonus as an incentive to a continued business relationship plus a thoughtful gift of some kind, preferably consumable so that whenever the artist is feeling down, overworked or insecure you can reassure them with another).
At the end of the day he wasn't stupid. As I pointed out before, starting a new company is a full-time job in itself and when establishing any new process you need to do a lot of running around checking everything at every stage until you're completely familiar with the business process, the people involved and can identify problems virtually instantly and know who to call and how to sort them out. This is why "moonlighting" like this is just a recipe for disaster. You also need to be the type of person who has the intelligence to see a gap in the market, the creativity to create a product to fill that gap, the attention to detail to check the plan over objectively and see flaws, the financial skills to manage the money correctly, the people skills to manage the people involved appropriately, and finally the time to do all of the above.
An entrepreneur is so special because they're a whole company in one person, and they have to do everything themselves because there is no-one else. In Japan they might be better served rather setting up a community oriented business, where a few people from work get together and divide up the work (and risk) according to their talents and means. This would suit the risk-averse and community-minded Japanese better and is a model that has been proven to work well in Japan. The Western entrepreneurial model simply doesn't play to Japanese people's strengths generally (there are some notable exceptions).
nath
put money down so you can sell something for someone? That, my friend, is a fool
marushka
Ok, they are not idiots, but very naïve. I mean- if I don’t know how to cook, I will learn it from people who can cook well. If I need law advice – I will check what kind of lawyer I need for this particular case. What I want to say- you are not just jumping into something without doing necessary researches, without creating a stable basis for your business ( even small, no matter) and without really knowing the subject…
GW
The first guy got a good thing going then miss managed it as Frungy said, he shot himself in the foot.
The second guy is 150% stupid idiot period, thousands upon thousands in Jpn fall for these part time businesses where they shud be able to start up with ZERO yen, just use their time, but get suckered to put a bunch of $$$$ up front or let the $$$ be handled & agree to be paid a cut, STUPID STUPID STUPID!!!
On ebay there are drop shippers selling CDs & stuff but they get the money first & pay the drop shipper once the customer rec the goods, now thats smart and NORMAL, fools here let themselves get screwed & even after reading about the scams fall for them all the time
space_monkey
Maybe they should get their wives of their lazy butts and get them working to earn a dollar or two.
savageink
"put money down so you can sell something for someone"
thats pretty much how most retail or even wholesale businesses work. You buy products at a lower rate then you sell them for.