Office romances blossom in Japan as taboo on dating colleagues wanes amid pandemic

For well over a year, fear of becoming the target of office gossip or upsetting his employer caused Junya Ozawa to hide his relationship with a work colleague.

"We just decided that it would be easier if other people in the company didn't know," said the 23-year-old employee of an event management company in Yokohama.

"We didn't want other people to be talking about us and my girlfriend thought that the company might move her to another department or even another office if they found out."

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Employers in Japan have long frowned up workplace romances, which are seen as a source of distraction or awkwardness in what should be a serious and professional setting.

But the pandemic appears to have brought with it a change in attitudes, leading more employees to open up about their coronaka, or "corona relationships".

Ozawa and his girlfriend had to come clean about their office romance after a colleague saw them out together on a date. But even with their relationship out in the open, no one seemed to mind - their workmates were happy for them, he said, and the company put up no resistance.

"We were sure that it would change things in the office, but everything just continued as it was before," Ozawa said.

A survey carried out last year by Japanese matchmaking and bridal company Tameny Inc found that 45.7 per cent of 162 respondents were actively looking for a workplace romance, up from 38.2 per cent in a study done four years before.

More dramatic still was the plummeting proportion of respondents who said they would want to keep such a relationship secret: just 16.1 per cent last year, compared to 41.3 per cent in the previous survey.

Makoto Watanabe, a professor of communications and media at Hokkaido Bunkyo University, attributed the change in attitudes to the curtailment of people's social lives amid the global health crisis.

"Our private worlds have shrunk so dramatically in the last couple of years," he told This Week In Asia. "Before the pandemic, people would be free to go out every day of the week ... they would go to bars or restaurants, they would go to galleries or cultural events, they would take part in sport or meet up with groups of people who shared their interests. That has all changed."

This change was especially pronounced in the pandemic's early days, Watanabe said, before the advent of vaccines and effective medical interventions against Covid-19 - but the psychological effects of the health crisis have been long lasting.

"The majority of people, I would say, stopped going out and had far fewer opportunities to meet potential partners," he said. "It affected all of us - I'm older, but for a few months last year pretty much the only people I interacted with were my family, my neighbours and people in shops."

An enduring reluctance to return to packed bars, nightclubs or restaurants for fear of infection had made it "inevitable" that love would bloom in the workplace instead, Watanabe said, as employees find themselves falling for the people who they interact with most.

Meanwhile, young Japanese are becoming more open about their relationships and have fewer qualms about office romances, he said.

"Maybe it is a cultural thing peculiar to Japan, but people used to want to keep their personal and professional lives quite separate so they were not open about their relationships," he said.

"But even I can see that is changing. I think young people today are freer from these sorts of psychological stresses, they are less concerned with what people think of them and they make friendships and relationships faster and more easily than previous generations. They are more open."

Not all Japanese companies have embraced the change and most are still quite conservative in their outlook, according to Nancy Ngou, who works in human resources for a large multinational firm with offices in Tokyo.

But there are others, like a former employer of hers, that actively try to play cupid with their staff, she said.

"It wasn't official company policy, but one of the staff was informally given the task of making connections," she said. "The company apparently felt it was responsible for every aspect of their employees' lives and thought staff would be happier to have their partner in the same office if everyone was working long hours."

Another consideration in attempting to pair people up may have been broader concerns about Japan's falling birth rate and shrinking population, said Ngou, who used to work in the United States.

"I know of places [in the US] where people had to quit when a relationship blossomed," she said, adding that she found employer-led matchmaking to be "quite a strange concept".

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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