Feb 28, 2022 (scmp.com) - Employers in Japan have long frowned up workplace romances, which are seen as a source of distraction or awkwardness in what should be a serious and professional setting.
But the pandemic appears to have brought with it a change in attitudes, leading more employees to open up about their coronaka, or “corona relationships”.
A survey carried out last year by Japanese matchmaking and bridal company Tameny Inc found that 45.7 per cent of 162 respondents were actively looking for a workplace romance, up from 38.2 per cent in a study done four years before.
More dramatic still was the plummeting proportion of respondents who said they would want to keep such a relationship secret: just 16.1 per cent last year, compared to 41.3 per cent in the previous survey.
Makoto Watanabe, a professor of communications and media at Hokkaido Bunkyo University, attributed the change in attitudes to the curtailment of people’s social lives amid the global health crisis.
“Our private worlds have shrunk so dramatically in the last couple of years,” he told This Week In Asia. “Before the pandemic, people would be free to go out every day of the week … they would go to bars or restaurants, they would go to galleries or cultural events, they would take part in sport or meet up with groups of people who shared their interests. That has all changed.”
This change was especially pronounced in the pandemic’s early days, Watanabe said, before the advent of vaccines and effective medical interventions against Covid-19 – but the psychological effects of the health crisis have been long lasting.
