Permanent employment has existed in Japan for nearly a century, having originally been created as a tactic used by master craftsmen to keep apprentices under their control, as well as to discourage job switching after the workers were trained. However, since its creation, permanent employment has evolved into something much more. Sometimes referred to as “lifetime employment,” because employees are employed for their entire career, large keiretsu conglomerates use permanent employment as a selling point for new college graduates to come and work for them. It is one of the advantages that keiretsus can offer over most small businesses and is very attractive due to the benefits that are offered in addition to a job for life within the company. 	
However, recently companies have begun to question whether or not permanent employment is right for them, and the overall usefulness of the system has been called into question. With a recession going on, Japanese corporations have no other choice but to make tough decisions and take a careful look at what they can improve upon. Some companies have looked to cut workers’ hours and/or slash wages in order to keep permanent employment alive. Does this mean that permanent employment in Japan is on its way out?
In this paper I will take a look at that question and explain why, although there are positives to the system, I think that the negatives far outweigh the positives and that permanent employment should be ended (or at least severely revised). First I will examine why Japan decided to implement permanent employment and touch on the positives of the system that I will expound upon in the following section. And finally, I will list the negatives of permanent employment before adding my concluding remarks.
The starting point for permanent employment is only half the story as one can only wonder why exactly it was implemented. Prior to the time period of which permanent employment was created, World War I recently ended and as a result, high labor turnover existed as well as increased strike and union activities. To combat this, administrators developed a system that would promote familism in the workplace, which took Japan as close to permanent employment as ever. However, this was not implemented countrywide by every employer. At that time (and to an extent now as well), only a selective amount of businesses practiced permanent employment. 
In studies conducted in the 1960s, it was concluded that permanent employment was implemented only in firms with more than 1000 workers. This means that only medium and large businesses (mainly keiretsus) practice this system. It is generally agreed that permanent employment applies to normal fulltime employees in large corporations, in some medium-sized private companies, and for bureaucrats as well. To explain this, Matsuzuka proposes that since larger firms spend a lot of money hiring and training workers (especially compared to smaller ones), having workers quit after investing so much in them would cost the company a lot of money, not to mention they would have to spend additional time training new recruits. 
