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The story
A thread posted to 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyou G” board sparked a clash of grievances between a manager who’s gone fully remote, full-time, because their child stopped attending school, and the poster who’s been left picking up the slack. The poster says they’re single-handedly stuck with assigning work, training new hires, and fielding complaints, all while the manager alone keeps collecting the management allowance — a situation they couldn’t accept. When they brought it up with their boss, they were reportedly told it was because the manager’s spouse isn’t able to help much with housework. Commenters were split on whether the real issue is remote work itself, or the evaluation system and how work gets divided.
What people said
I'm doing ALL of it and not getting a single allowance for it
The higher-up boss (female — 5ch posters often tack on "膣," literally "vagina," as a mocking tag for a woman): "Our manager's husband can't help much with housework because of his own job — it's tough on her!"
I gave up trying to reason with them.
Why should a third party — neither the spouse nor a parent — have to cover, for free, responsibilities the spouse dropped?
Sounds made up ("uso-matsu" — 5ch slang for a suspiciously fake sob story).
Waste of time engaging with that.
Better for the company if she works 6 hours and watches the kid for 2, rather than taking a full 8-hour day off for childcare — that's why it's tolerated.
But honestly, getting paid for time spent on childcare is messed up in the first place.
She's not working during that time.
If you're not working, that time should just be unpaid leave.
Because she's remote, she can't actually do the work a manager is supposed to do, and that creates an exploitative setup where someone else — getting zero allowance — has to fill the gap.
No matter what you're doing day to day, you can be judged on whether you deliver a solid final product.
Old-school Japanese companies ("JTC" — 5ch shorthand for Japanese Traditional Company, i.e. old-fashioned corporate culture) that judge you on process have no business doing remote work.
I just want to quit already.
If I'm getting paid for it, I'll work as much as you want. I have zero interest in working to fund someone else's paycheck.
Not having to deal with coworkers face-to-face, no commute — that's huge.
Though it's normal enough when the job isn't full-time/permanent employment to begin with.
Like I said above — having someone's output drop from 10 to 7 is still better than it dropping to 0, so you can't just cut her loose.
Honestly, I do think she shouldn't get the management allowance, but I'm not saying she should quit either.
Remote work at non-results-based Japanese companies is a slacker's paradise.
I'd get it if pay were cut and remote offered instead as a perk, but there are people out there now demanding it like it's some kind of inherent right.
Being single comes with its own flight risk, and honestly, if someone's got a decent personality, they're usually married anyway.
There's barely anyone competent who's still single in their 30s-50s. And the few competent singles tend to job-hop fast, while competent married people stick around — so married people make way better managers.
I already posted above what happened when I told management.
My job's in a completely different area from my remote boss's, and it involves a lot of hands-on stuff like handling the printer and mail, so I can't go remote.
Back then I still had hope for the company, so I was taking on extra work proactively to boost my own evaluation.
But after more than a year with nothing to show for it, I finally lost it.
Well, if you're actually working overtime, of course you claim for it.
Background and the Debate
In Japanese companies, a management allowance is generally positioned as compensation for being classified as a “managerial supervisor” under labor law — a status that exempts the person from overtime pay — on the assumption that they’re actually performing managerial duties like evaluating subordinates and allocating staff. What this thread really debated wasn’t whether remote work itself is acceptable, but a question of fairness in evaluation and workload distribution: should the allowance and performance rating stay unchanged even when the managerial duties aren’t actually being carried out? Underlying this is the gap between job types that are easy to judge by results and Japan’s corporate culture, which tends to emphasize process over outcomes — making it too simplistic to just say “remote work is the problem.”
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyou G) thread “Manager (female) says: ‘I’m the only one working remote full-time because my kid won’t go to school’ — here’s why she still gets the management allowance.”
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