Dads' Dilemma

(3 of 3)
Raku Yoshida, a 33-year-old father of two, works in an airline's reservations office in Tokyo. So that he can spend as much time as possible with his children, he gets up at 5 a.m. to answer e-mails and tackle household chores. His reward is being able to wake up his children for breakfast and an hour of play before he heads to the office. The working day normally ends by 7 p.m. because Yoshida took the radical step, in 2005, of asking his employer for a less demanding job. (Prior to that, he notched up 14-hour stints.) This means he can have another hour with his kids in the evening. He tucks them into bed at around 8.30 p.m. and falls asleep not long after. "There are very few men around me who spend as much time with their children as I do," he says. "In fact, many people are putting in more overtime [than before]." He's not wrong: the 2005 financial year was Japan's worst ever when it came to karoshi, or death from overwork, with 330 cases of people dying from work-induced heart attacks, strokes or other ailments.

Of course, most fathers feel less at liberty than Yoshida to walk out of the office at a sane hour. "The number of men who want to balance work and home is increasing," says Emiko Takeishi, a human-resources expert at Tokyo's Hosei University, "but when you take a look at figures on long working hours, or the take-up of paid leave, they're worse than before." A recent survey by Japan's Cabinet Office found that while 70% of fathers wanted to balance home and career, 23% had little or no time to spend with their children on weekdays. Some are even reluctant to take time off for the birth of their kids. In South Korea, civil servants are permitted three days' paternity leave, but the figures suggest that men either don't want it or feel pressured not to take it. In 2005, just 208 fathers in the civil service used their entitlement, compared with 10,492 women who took maternity leave.

If there's one person who can convince men to spend more time with their families, it's not necessarily a child or a wife. It's a boss who leads by example. Studies show that when CEOs and department heads try to balance their own lives, instead of merely urging subordinates to do so, then everyone benefits. "In our research we have found that any change in attitude works best when the tone at the top stipulates what the corporate culture will be," says Karen Sumberg of the Center for Work-Life Policy in the U.S. "If taking time to go see your child play soccer is O.K., and you see that the man or woman at the top does the same thing, then the culture will start to shift in that direction."

This may explain the varying degrees of success Asian companies have had with programs aimed at fathers. In Japan, cosmetics firm Shiseido introduced an enlightened scheme in April 2005 whereby employees with children under 3 are offered a one-time benefit of an additional two weeks of paid leave. Since the scheme's adoption, says spokesman Tatsuyoshi Endo, only 28 men have taken advantage of the offer. (At Shiseido's Tokyo head office 1,780 of the 3,300 employees are men, but the firm doesn't keep a tally of how many are fathers). Other companies are offering similarly progressive programs that would once have been unthinkable in Asia. At IBM in Singapore, 70% of the 3,000 mostly male employees regularly participate in the firm's "mobility program," which lets them work from home as long as they can be contacted via e-mail or phone. In addition, fathers are allowed to work 22 half-days in every six months if they use that extra time for family purposes. "With the wife working, there is an expectation that fathers should share more responsibilities in the home," says IBM's human-resources manager for Singapore, Tho Lye Sam. One benefit of this increased involvement, she adds, is that "fathers are now much closer to their children."

But even where there's no official support, men can improvise ways of boosting the time they spend with their kids. While living in Singapore several years ago, Prasenjit Basu found that his ferocious working hours as Credit Suisse First Boston's chief economist in Asia were causing him to miss out on seeing his two young children. "What I began to do was come home for lunch at the time they came home from school," he says. As his children grew older, their school days lengthened. "I'd be eating my lunch at 3 p.m. or 3:45 p.m.," Basu laughs, but he has no regrets. In Seoul, Yang Sunmook, the 48-year-old chairman of the Democratic Party, says he took the unusual step of taking his two sons to some of the social functions that cram a politician's diary "so I could be with them." If successful economists and politicians can make these efforts, so can other men. Masahiro Endo, a 33-year-old father of two and a gas-station owner in Japan's Niigata prefecture, runs two websites for fathers, publishing articles with titles like "Let's Master the Three Categories of Housework." But not so long ago, he says, he was a living anachronism—the kind of father who "couldn't cook or do any kind of housework." He decided to change when he realized that he no longer wanted to depend on his wife's ministrations. So, Endo began to teach himself how to become a modern male, juggling the demands of his home and his business. Endo's discovery: "You can handle it as long as you're ingenious about the time you do have."

Cheerfully dealing with myriad commitments, being smart about your time, and accepting that being a parent means being responsible for both the material and emotional welfare of your children: this is the new way of Asian fatherhood. Gentlemen, does it remind you of anyone? But of course. "Women are doing it," says Endo. "So why can't we?"

with reporting by Neel Chowdhury / Singapore, Ling Woo Liu / Hong Hong, Yuki Oda and Michiko Toyama / Tokyo, Benjamin Siegel / New Delhi, Natalie Tso / Taipei, Jennifer Veale / Seoul and Jodi Xu / Beijing