Japanese corporate culture is a strange beast where lifetime employment is considered the norm. It's considered very embarrassing for a Japanese company to publicly admit one of their employees has left the company, especially a prominent one like Kojima. And outright firing someone is a social taboo and also a lot more restricted under Japanese labor law compared to the US. Admitting you fired someone is even more of an embarrassment. Broadly speaking, retirement is the only acceptable way of leaving a company.
Rather, when they want to get rid of someone, they tend to do things like:
- demote them into dead-end jobs or give them much weirder 'promotions' where they get a fancy new title and position that really doesn't mean anything and they just sit on their ass all day, while the company hopes they'll eventually leave on their own out of boredom/frustration.
- or, indeed, force them to go on vacation until their contract runs out, or they become eligible for early retirement and then try to push them into that.
In any case, what's important is that the employee is still officially on the payroll, even if they're really not doing anything for the company anymore.
gigastar said:
Actually what i heard is that theres a quirk in Japanese law that says someone has to use up all their remaining vacation time before they can officially leave a job.
That also seems quite possible.