It's 9 o'clock on a Monday morning. A phone rings in an office and the boss picks it up. At the other end she hears the fragile voice of one of her staff telling her she broke up with her boyfriend the day before. "I would like to take a shitsuren kyuka," the staffer says. Unperturbed, the boss replies: "No problem. Take care of yourself." And with that the conversation ends.
That phone conversation is likely to occur in the future in the Tokyo office of Miki Hiradate's market-research company Hime & Company. By asking for a shitsuren kyuka, the staffer would be requesting "compassionate leave to fix a broken heart" -- and its granting would be the norm.
"Unless you are extremely lucky," says Hiradate, the firm's 37-year-old founder and president, "you will definitely have the experience in your 20s and 30s of being brokenhearted after someone leaves you.