Salaryman

Salaryman (“salaryman” also in Japanese) is the informal word referring to business workers in Japan. The word “salaryman” appeared in the 1910s but it did not develop to the term of a social class unifying various vocational office workers like the cases of German “Angestellte” or French “cadre.” This reflected the social history of Japan, in which the office workers' movement has been weak and corporation unions including both office workers and laborers developed rapidly after the World War II. The term became the symbol of Japanese workers after the economic boom in the 1960s, although workers in big corporations with over 500 employees have never exceeded 30 percent of the Japanese workforce. However, due to the stagnation of the Japanese economy since the mid‐1990s and the increase in nonregular work (37.9 percent of employees in 2018), the term has been gradually losing the connotation of the typical Japanese worker.