Japanese workers turn to resignation agencies

Typical contracts will require a 1 month period between you announce you're quitting and you effective termination date.

If you have enough paid vacation you could pad that period with your vacation, but it requires pre-acceptance, so cooperation from your employer. Otherwise you're into non-accepted vacation territory, which could lead to financial penalties (basically withdrawing your salary, with potential tax adjustements. They could also try to sue you, and given you're fleeing assume they'd get a default judgement for instance)

Then there's all the paperwork you actually want to have properly done by your employer. They're legally obligated to, but it's always harder if you're in adversarial mode.

All in all, you can still quit cold turkey ("bakkure"), but that's a usually a PITA. Getting a pro to negociate a clean separation will be better than just disappearing, if you're not in the mood/capacity to face your employer.

PS; There are magical words that would give any employee an immediate option to never see their employer again. I don't want them in my comments, but anyone interested will find them with a simple search.

Contracts might require it, but the law says 2 weeks (on a regular full time contract or a limited contract after the first year) and contracts can't supersede the law.

>I don't want them in my comments

Why not? Are they obscene somehow?

I presume you are referring to sekuhara (sexual harassment), pawahara (power harassment) and the like

People don't want to deal with the fallout of saying that, hence quitting agents

> If you have enough paid vacation you could pad that period with your vacation, but it requires pre-acceptance, so cooperation from your employer.

It doesn't necessarily need their cooperation. A letter sent by registered mail saying "I am using my paid leave for x days from y day", then another one saying "I resign on y day + two weeks" is enough. Of course, people would actually need to know and be willing to use their labor rights in order to do that, which is the service that quitting agents are providing.

Yes. The law clearly set 2 weeks [0].

It puts the employee in the strongest position, but doesn't completely voids a contract. For instance the employer can still fight it by justifying a necessity for them to have a longer period, or convincing a court the contract had enough provisions to make it a reasonable clause.

It would be a huge PITA on both sides though, I don't see many companies wanting that much trouble just for a single employee trying to leave the boat.

[0] https://jsite.mhlw.go.jp/miyagi-roudoukyoku/library/miyagi-r...

Are the actual official Japanese words for sexual harassment and power harassment... just Japanese pronunciations / abbreviations of the English terms?

Yes. In Japanese this kind of abbreviation does not carry the childish/frivolous connotations it does in English.

I'm a bit surprised that people are so caught of guard.

I have never had a resignation period of less then 1 month in several European countries (BeNeLux and Poland)

My last job had resignation period of 7 week from the Monday after sending my notice.

4 full calendar months for my current resignation period, e.g. if I resign today, my last official day will be the 31 March (December, January, February , March).

In my experience, the connotations are very similar to English use. What matters is the context. Say sekuhara or sexual harassment at work: very serious connotation. Amongst friends or in media (comdey/anime/etc): potentially frivolous/unserious connotation.

I'd compare it to jury nullification, it's something anyone probably knows, but you wouldn't want to be posting on SNS while being a juror.

In the US we have at-will employment, which online people like to only talk about the negatives (employer can fire you at any time without notice), but it goes the other way too: We can quit with no notice. It's still courtesy to give two weeks notice though, to handle transferring work/knowledge.

Over a month seems really long to me.

I would assume most HN users are in the United States, where the notice period is two weeks by custom, or thirty seconds if you are mad enough that you don't care about things like references and eligibility for rehire. The latter is considered unprofessional but generally won't keep you from getting another job. Most people aren't aware that European-style job contracts exist.

I've had lots of arguments with Europeans on the internet about whether the benefit of their job security exceeds the costs of what Americans who are aware of the European system tend to perceive as indentured servitude.

It's very different IME. A catchy abbreviation of a serious subject would almost always be inappropriate in English-speaking spheres, especially in a business setting.