Too scared to quit? An agency will do that for you

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Deflation, balance sheet recession, natural disasters, the rise of China. Corporate Japan has weathered some bruising onslaughts over the years, but is it ready for the disruptive mischief of a bow-tied, homburg-wearing duck?

The troublesome bird is the mascot of Momuri — a company with a name that roughly translates as “I’ve had it up to here!” and is prominent among more than a dozen agencies and law firms that specialise in resignation by proxy. We quit, goes their simple-sounding but lucrative business model, so you don’t have to do it in person.

What these agencies are also doing — with a combination of idea-planting, bottleneck-removal and empowerment — is unleashing a wave of de facto activism from an angle companies did not expect. By selling workers a guilt-free licence for mobility, the agencies are crystallising discontent that many companies will have hoped to remain inchoate, but which they cannot now ignore. Investors probably believe that, when it comes to forcing corporate Japan to change, they are pulling the longest levers available. Serious torque, meanwhile, is being handed to the quitters.

Pioneered in pre-Covid days, and targeting a clientele happy to pay between ¥11,000-¥27,000 ($70-$175) to avoid the confrontation, emotional strain, social awkwardness or clerical faff of quitting in person, the resignation agencies are proliferating and doing a brisk trade. The larger ones processed more than 1,500 cases each in April alone, the smaller ones hundreds, and several told the Financial Times that business is running at a clip three times higher than last year. Critically, many of the customers are not browbeaten veterans, but new graduates.

The agencies’ sales pitch has evolved for growth in an ever tightening, demographically contracting job market: one where everyone now frets about recruitment and retention. The agencies are no longer just facilitating the resignation, but precipitating it. They can be bolder about this because customers now engage their services with greater confidence that they will quickly find another job. The agencies tend to be named using slangy or quaint turns of phrase explicitly designed to normalise dissatisfaction and departure in a work culture that has historically ennobled forbearance and fealty. The original, Exit Inc, has been followed by Yametara Iinen (It’s OK to quit), Yamerun desu (Let’s quit), Saraba (Adieu) and various others. 

Momuri, with its signature duck, has gone even further. For the next year, straphanging commuters on three separate Metro lines in Tokyo and a fourth in Osaka will see, on the straps themselves, the name of the company. And why stop at leaving one job? Momuri is currently dangling an offer in which, if you quit twice within 12 months, you get the second proxy resignation half price.

The agencies are now numerous and busy enough to produce interesting data. As the first day of the Japanese financial year, April 1 is when graduates across the country start their new jobs — positions they will traditionally have fought for, cherished and stuck to for years even if the reality fell far short of the recruiters’ promise.

This year, graduates began calling the agencies on their first day in the office. By the end of April, Momuri alone had proxy-resigned more than 200 graduates who wanted out of their new positions within the first few weeks after orientation. Some, said a Momuri executive, could not stand their new bosses, some did not like the department they had been assigned to, many quickly identified other problems — challenges that might, in the past, have been seen as grim rites of passage rather than quit-inducing red flags.

There may be a strong temptation to decry this as a symptom of some wider weakness among younger Japanese. But that underplays the power of their actions. For nearly a decade, Japan itself has been clear that, in aggregate, its companies have a governance problem. The more readily articulated criticism of top management has become, the easier it has been to overlook the huge, lower-level changes that companies need to undertake to become permanently attractive and acceptable workplaces for a generation unconvinced by the old rules. The quitting agencies are making that imbalance less possible and creating a form of activism that cannot be bought off with a share buyback or a hiked dividend. 

In an ideal world, says Shinji Tanimoto, president of the company that controls Momuri, companies would change their behaviour and the proxy quitting agencies would not need to exist. Instead, he forecasts long-term growth. The best hope, he adds, “is that we act as a deterrent to bad corporate behaviour”.

leo.lewis@ft.com