How Japanese black companies oppress workers (2014)

Interestingly, this is actually possible under Japanese law/legal precedent. If an employee, for example, decides to put in notice and then half-ass their job until their departure date, a company could actually sue the employee and win.

Other Japan-labor-law fun fact: if you are a contract worker, it is literally illegal for you to quit prior to your contract expiry date. Hope you like that job you signed onto!

Obligatory disclaimer: IANAL

1. While it is technically true a company could sue a worker for quitting, the amount of damages they'd have to show is far beyond anything they'd be able to do outside of an upper management position. As far as I know, you could not sue someone for doing a half assed job.

2. I'm not even sure how you are using the word "illegal" here. AFAIK there is no provisions in criminal law for punishing people who break employment contracts. What I assume you are talking about is that a contract worker is bound by the terms of their contract as far as notice to quit goes, but there are a couple of limits to this. - This only applies in the first year of the contract. After the contract has been renewed once, standard Japanese labor law applies, which is two weeks of notice. - Similar to the above statement about suing someone for quitting, Japanese law only allows for suits to be for actual damages, so the company would have to prove significant damages to make the suit worth it. Contract workers are generally not high value employees so it would be unusual for one to be worth suing over.

A judge would automatically throw out the case if this was the argument for suing an employee. The reasoning being, if you continued to pay the employee during the term of their employment, and you knew that the employee was not performing based on some KPI or some yard stick, you would issue warning to the employee to improve their performance, or you would fire the employee on the spot. Continuing keep an underperforming employee is giving tactic consent that their work is reasonably acceptable because if it wasn't, you would start disciplinary action or cease their employment.

Threating a employee with coercive threats (such as threats of legal action) is going to land the business into hot water in any modern society.

We're talking about an employee on a fixed term contract, so there's not really any scope for disciplinary action of the "performance improvement plan" type. And the argument would be that they were hired because of a time-sensitive job (hence the need for this kind of irregular employee) and so just not paying them for work doesn't make the company whole, they needed someone to do that work at that specific point in time and if not then they have damages that are much larger than the salary they would've paid.

Of course by the time you get to court you can poke several holes in this argument. But under Japanese law it's a valid argument on its face, so it's something the employer can use to threaten.