Fighting For Parental Leave Rights, With Glen Wood
In the ongoing fight for parental rights in the workplace, Glen Wood‘s story stands as a powerful testament to the challenges and triumphs of advocating for work-life balance. In this episode, J.R. Lowry interviews Glen Wood, a Canadian national who spent three decades in Japan and worked as an equity sales manager at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities. Glen shares his deeply personal journey of fighting for paternity leave after the birth of his son, the subsequent workplace harassment he allegedly faced, and the legal battle that ensued. Beyond his own experiences, Glen delves into the broader issues of corporate sustainability, the importance of valuing employees as people, and how prioritizing family can ultimately lead to a more successful and profitable company. This episode offers valuable insights into navigating parental leave policies, challenging workplace norms, and understanding the crucial connection between employee well-being and long-term business success.
Check out the full series of Career Sessions, Career Lessons podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/glen-wood.
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Fighting For Parental Leave Rights, With Glen Wood
Author Of Too Big To Care: Adopt Sustainable Business Practices Or Embrace Defeat
From Pianist To Finance Guru: Glen Wood’s Journey To Japan
If you want to take control of your career, join the PathWise community. Basic membership is free. My guest is Glen Wood. Glen is a Canadian national who has lived in Japan for over three decades. He worked in financial services for many years, including as an Equity Sales Manager at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities in 2015.
Upon the birth of his son, he requested paternity leave, a right protected under Japanese law. His initial requests were denied by a company citing a lack of precedent. Ultimately, he was granted leave but faced alleged workplace harassment upon his return, including demotion and exclusion from meetings. In 2017, he filed a lawsuit against the firm, accusing it of paternity harassment. We’re going to be talking about parental rights and why they’re so important, Glen’s own parental leave story and his legal fight against his employer, his book Too Big to Care, and his broader career journey. Let’s get started.
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Glen, welcome, and thank you for doing the show with me. It’s good to have you as a guest.
It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Let’s start with your background. You are a Canadian, but I know you’ve lived in Japan for three-plus decades. Can you share a little bit about your background and what brought you to Japan in the first place?
Sure. I’m originally Canadian. I was born in Canada. I was a pianist from a very young age, so I traveled a lot doing music work. I was in China before I came to Japan. I came to Japan in about 1989 for the first time. I worked on Wall Street and whatnot, but I’ve been in and out of Japan for over 30 years.
We’re going to talk about parents in the workforce. What were your parents doing that had you traveling to places like China when you were a kid?
My dad died before I was born. A lot of the initiatives to travel and the curiosity came from within me. I was always driving people crazy with my curiosity. I always asked too many questions, and as a result, I loved music. I graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and then started performing and teaching around the world. I loved my time in China, but the Tiananmen Square incident was a little too much for me. That’s when I went to Japan.
Did you perform professionally for a while, then?
Yes, and I was teaching. I did that for a while in Japan as well. I was invited to join a think tank with the Prime Minister of Japan. We were talking about the economy and the education system. A lot of these things I didn’t know very much about, so I studied a lot. I spoke Japanese. They wanted a foreigner on the think tank who could also communicate in Japanese.
Parental Rights: It’s disingenuous to see politicians in TV advertisements encouraging people to have children. And then, when you actually dare to start a family, you get fired.
It was through that experience that I got intrigued by studying economics and finance. I went to the US and did an MBA at Wharton and an MA in international relations at the University of Pennsylvania. From there, I went to Wall Street. After the experience on Wall Street, they sent me back to Japan because of my experience here. That started a twenty-year career in financial services.
You eventually ended up at Mitsubishi UFJ. What led you there, and what was your role there?
After the global financial crisis, you’ll remember that Mitsubishi took a large financial stake in Morgan Stanley, saving Morgan Stanley from bankruptcy. As a result, in Japan, they formed a couple of companies. The one I ended up at was Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities. They invited me in to expand their global footprint. It was largely a domestic firm at the time, but they wanted to use the Morgan Stanley connections as well as my experience in the global network to expand their global business, especially in equities. I was the global head of equities and was responsible for New York, London, San Francisco, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo in terms of building the business with global clients.
Relative to the time you spent on Wall Street, how did you find working in financial services in Japan? What was similar? What was different?
The culture in financial services is quite competitive. Before Mitsubishi Morgan Stanley, I was at Goldman Sachs. I loved my time at Goldman Sachs. It was extraordinarily competitive and a driven place. I’m a very driven and competitive person myself, so I loved it. Mitsubishi had a different pace than Goldman Sachs. There were still a lot of good people, but I found that it was a lot of grassroots building relationships and bringing in clients. I loved it, though. We did turn the business around, and we drove a lot of client business for the first few years I was there.
I haven’t spent a lot of time working in Japan. Frankly, a handful of days. On the ground, it strikes me that it’s a very relationship-driven place. It takes a long time to build credibility in the market. It can easily be destroyed, but it takes a very long time to build it up. Was that consistent with your experience working in the industry?
Yes, that echoes true. Japan, with thousands of years of history, has developed a very deep, intricate type of relationship-driven culture. Relationships do take a long time to build, and along with reputation, they’re very easily destroyed. It’s often said about Japan that it’s a great place to visit and a wondrous place to spend some time, but it’s the worst place in the world to work. I’ve found that the many years of being in Japan and working in Japan, that certainly rings true as well.
It’s always had a reputation for expecting very long hours and then evening socializing. It seems not to be the easiest place to work if you want to have a work-life balance, however you define that. Having a family, and we’re going to get to that in a second, there’s a clear tension there with a parent, one or both, away for long parts of the day.
Especially since the end of the war, the “economic miracle” that we saw in Japan until the bubble burst many years ago was largely driven by the fact that men were the property of their company. When you joined the company, you sold your soul and all your priorities to the company. Family came third, fourth, or fifth. The company was always one, two, and three.
That drove the economic miracle, but it also drove a lot of change in terms of social dynamics and how families operate. If the husband is never home or the husband isn’t available to support the family, then what does that mean for the family unit? We’re seeing some of those consequences, with the huge demographic issues that Japan’s facing. Losing a million people per year in terms of the population at this point is incredible. It’s quite a dark future for the country.
The Corporate Soul And The Fight For Parental Leave
Let’s talk a little bit about your own experience. You hit the point in your career where you were plugging along, but on the home front, you were ready to have a family. Take us from there.
If you want to talk about sustainability and ESG and increase your profits, you have to put people first. Share on XMy experience at the company was good. Things were growing rapidly. The team was growing. I was thrilled to find out that I was going to become a father in 2015. I began to talk to the company about it and realized that I might need to take a little bit of time off. Unfortunately, my son was born six weeks premature, and he was born overseas from Japan. The hospital called me in the middle of the night and said, “You’ve got to come. It doesn’t look like your son’s going to make it.” I was in shock.
I went in early the next morning and poured my heart out to the management and to the bosses. Even though I knew the culture in Japan and I’ve been here for a very long time, I was surprised by the response. It was, “Don’t worry about it. Get back to your desk. Things will be okay.” It was very nonchalant and cold. The discussion began at that point. Eventually, it ended up with me being fired for taking time off for my family.
Let’s walk through a little bit of the details. Some of the readers aren’t familiar with parental leave rights in Japan. What was the state of playback in 2015 when your son was born?
Japan saw this demographic car crash coming many years ago. In the ‘80s, they developed a legal framework, which is very beneficial to parents, or it should be, both maternity leave and paternity leave. Parental rights in general are granted. The company’s responsibility is only twofold. One, they can’t reject the application by a parent. Two, when the parent comes back to work, they have to give them their job back. All the costs are borne by the government. It doesn’t cost the company anything except the time that the worker is away.
Unfortunately, Corporate Japan didn’t get the memo. Much of corporate Japan, as the title of my new book says, Too Big to Care, operates above the Law. For many years, even though these laws existed on paper, people knew that the internal rule book or the real rules meant that you couldn’t take it. If you did take it, it meant the end of your career, whether you were a man or a woman. For women who typically opted to take maternity leave, that would be the end of their careers. They would never go back to work. If a man dared to put up their hand to take paternity leave, it would be an act of treason. That is how the company would look at it. You would be harassed and fired.
Unfortunately, that has led to a dramatic decline in the Japanese population overall. You can imagine the equation. If you need both the mother and father to be working, you’re generating two incomes. When you decide to have a child, that means you’re going to double your costs and you’re going to have your income. For the majority of people, that doesn’t work. What that leads to is a delay in the decision to have children. For women, that often means that they can’t have children. At the end of the day, we’ve got the demographic situation where we’ve got Japan losing a million people per year off their population. That’s devastating for a culture and an economy.
Let’s come back to your situation. Your son was born overseas prematurely in a life-or-death situation. You get told to go back to your desk. How does it play out over the next hours and days?
For me, it was a tragic experience, to be honest. The hospital kept calling. I was being sent these pictures of my son in an incubator, looking like he was about to die, and saying, “If you don’t get here, there are going to be a lot of legal problems because you’re the father.” On the other hand, the company was very nonchalant, saying, “There’s nothing to worry about. Medical situations these days are advanced. Your son will be fine. Don’t worry about it.”
To me, as a father, I felt like going to the airport and getting on the plane. For me, as someone who understood corporate life, I knew I couldn’t do that. I loved my career. I wanted to continue my job. I researched the laws. I submitted the application for paternity leave several times, and every time, it was denied. They wouldn’t even accept the application, no matter what I wrote on it. It was disheartening and discouraging. At one point, they said, “You can leave, but you’re walking away from your job.” It was like a threat.
Eventually, I had to leave. They wouldn’t approve any sort of leave under any circumstances. At one point, they kept asking me to do these impossible things. They asked me to produce this maternity handbook. There’s a maternity handbook that’s given to pregnant women in Japan. It’s only a Japanese thing. They asked me to produce one of these, and then they might approve it. I’m not Japanese and I’m not a woman, so no doctor will give me one.
If you're not generating value to society and to people, then what are you doing as a corporation and why do you exist? Share on XThe next thing they said was, “Give us a DNA test that proves that you’re the father,” which is unbelievable. Frankly, my son had been born and was about to die. How was I going to get a DNA test before I left? They presented these impossible hurdles, one after the next, which were meant to get me to give up, sit down, and shut up.
At some point, frankly, after a twenty-year career and understanding, looking around, and seeing that all the pregnant women were also disappearing from the company, this was systemic. This was something that they had a playbook for. They ran the playbook every time somebody asked for time off for family, whether you’re a man, a woman, or whoever you are.
Frankly, for me, as a new dad and as someone who had been in the industry for a long time, I said, “Somebody’s got to say something. This isn’t going to work.” It’s so disingenuous to have all the politicians standing up there and all these advertisements on TV and the newspaper trying to encourage people to have children, but when you dare to try to have a family, you get fired. The gap between logic and sincerity was so big for me that I said, “Forget it. I’m not only going to go and take this paternity leave now, which is my legal right, but I’m going to stand up and talk about this for all the people that have suffered over the years and hopefully make a difference for my kids and the people going forward.”
I started writing about it. I started a lawsuit against the company, which is still going on ten years later. Eventually, I published a book, which I’d love everybody to take a look at. If you can’t, as a company, even talk about ESG or sustainability without having some sort of parental rights and without offering the ability for your employees to have both a family and a career, it’s ridiculous.
The Ripple Effect: How Parental Rights Impact Society And Business
You should give us the update on your son because I’m sure people who are reading are wondering about that. The connection you’re making between ultimately, people choose not to have children because they can’t work and have a family, and when they don’t have a family, the population declines, which has an impact on the economy, which is not sustainable. I doubt many people are making that linkage.
As I was writing the book, I had to pinch myself, saying, “Does this have to be said?” It seemed to me so obvious. To have a growing economy, you cannot have a decreasing demographic. Likewise, if you’re a corporation and you’re not allowing your people to have children, who are tomorrow’s workers? Who’s going to work for your company if your people aren’t having children?
Likewise, if you’re trying to have motivated, happy employees, and 80% to 90% of people want to have a family, and that’s what motivates them as a human being, then how’s that going to work out for you? You’re going to lose motivation. If you’re firing pregnant women and not allowing people to have children, you’re going to have unhappy employees. It’s going to be more expensive for you to hire people. Your attrition’s going to go up. Your customers aren’t going to be happy because they’re going to see that your employees aren’t happy.
At the end of the day, investors aren’t going to want to invest in your company, so your cost of equity will go up and your profitability will drop. If you want to increase the profitability of your corporation, you should be very supportive of parental rights. That connection, people don’t seem to make. That’s the point I’m making.
Many companies will say probably one of the biggest corporate lies, in many instances, which is, “Our people are our greatest assets.”
Frankly, if you want to talk about sustainability, if you want to talk about ESG, if you want to increase your profits, you have to put people first. If you look at the great companies over the years that have done that, they’ve succeeded incredibly. Apple comes to mind. Look at all the speeches that Steve Jobs gave about how important the people were and how he hired the right person, didn’t micromanage them, and let them do their job.
Micromanagement is an indication that you’ve hired the wrong people and that you’re not giving your people what they need to succeed. Let’s stop making excuses for these behaviors, and let’s look at what already motivates people. If you give them what already motivates them, you have a happy, fulfilled workforce, and people are excited to come to work in the morning, you’ve won half the battle already.
Tell us about what ended up happening with your son. We should have gotten to this earlier.
Part of the reason I don’t talk about it as much is that it was a miraculous recovery. He did very well, and he’s doing well. There’s nothing that makes me happier than being a dad. For anybody who wants to be a dad, anybody who wants to be a mom, anybody who wants to have a family, I want to make sure, not only for my kids, but for anybody out there, that everybody has the right to have both a family and a career. At the end of the day, if you deny that to people, if you deny your workers that, or if you’re the government and you’re denying your people that, you’re going to struggle going forward.
When you were having this fight, trying to get your application approved, how were your coworkers reacting to this whole situation? Were they supportive? Were they trying to talk you out of it? Were they more hostile before you took your leave? How did they respond?
There was a real cultural divide at that point. Most of the Japanese employees, or at least the culturally Japanese employees, felt that they had to fall into line. That’s part of the Japanese work culture. You can’t put up your hand. If somebody’s being told something by management, you close your eyes, put your head down, and pretend you don’t even know what’s going on.
The Western employees around the world were extraordinarily supportive and shocked. On the back of my experience, many of them ended up leaving the company because they were so shocked. Likewise, many of our clients, the foreign-based clients, who saw what was going on stopped doing business with the company. At the end of the day, unfortunately, because of the choices that management made, it ended up hurting their business.
Workplace Retaliation: Harassment After Parental Leave
You took your leave and came back, but then you started to experience what your lawsuit alleges is harassment. What form did that take?
There are these old stories, and I don’t know if you may have heard them, from the bubble years in Japan. When an employee disobeyed or did something that was deemed not appropriate to the company, like putting family first, they would send them out to pick weeds in the garden, or they would put them in a room without any electricity and not have any lights or something. A lot of those stories were true. That’s how they ended up getting rid of these employees who were deemed to have committed treason.
I faced something not quite as extreme, but I didn’t have a job. I was told to sit there and do nothing. They played all sorts of games. They would schedule a meeting for 3:00, and the meeting was scheduled for 5:00, so I’d be sitting in the room for 2 hours with nobody there. It was very silly, high school, jokey types of things to try and discourage me and to make me feel like I didn’t have any responsibility. All my global responsibilities were taken away from me.
At the end of the day, when I pushed them on it, they said, “We want you to take care of your family.” Basically, they’d taken away my job and taken away my career. After a few months, they cut my salary and didn’t give me any bonus. They kept making the situation worse, such that it wasn’t only illegal, but it was inhumane.
This was a standard playbook. If there were a woman who had a child, and then she came back to work and tried to continue her career, they’d do the same thing. I hadn’t looked very closely at it, but then, when it was happening and I could look back and ask people, “Is this what they do?” it became very clear. That was all the more reason why I felt that somebody had to say something.
It’s beyond disingenuous. This is immoral. It’s illegal. This is the standard playbook, and on one hand, they’re creating these beautiful CSR brochures, all the wonderful things they’re doing for society, and all the wonderful investments they’re making around the world, and yet they’re not allowing their employees to have a family. I felt there was too much for me to be part of such a management team, so I broke free. I am fighting it to this day.
The intention isn’t to win any lawsuits. The intention is to make a difference and make sure that my kids never have to face this. The paternity leave numbers, when I started, were that about 1% of Japanese men were able to take paternity leave. In 2025, the number was over 30%. Lawyers and whatnot in the community say, “It’s on the back of our case. It’s on the back of our efforts,” which frankly, makes me extremely happy. I feel from that perspective that we’ve won a huge victory. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s great to see the progress that’s been made.
Eventually, you got fired when you filed your lawsuit. How does Japan’s legal system handle workplace discrimination cases like the one that you were filing?
Parental Rights: The intention isn’t to win any lawsuits. The intention is to make a difference.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t call it a legal system. The Japanese “legal system” is something that’s modeled after the legal system in China from many years ago. It hasn’t changed that much. The main purpose of the legal system is to protect corporations, protect Japan Incorporated, and protect politicians. It has nothing to do with justice. That’s something that, from a Western perspective, is difficult to grasp.
The whole idea is that you can file a lawsuit if you want, but the court will do whatever it wants at the end of the day to protect the corporation. Some of the things are so egregious that as a Westerner, it blows your mind. To tell you one anecdote, I remember one day, I walked into court and my lawyers had asked the company to submit documents from when I was an employee, such as my schedules and things like that, so they could prove that my job had been taken away from me.
The company’s lawyers had produced this 60-page brief that described all the things and all the reasons why they don’t think they should have to submit these documents because they’re internal and proprietary information, and that it wasn’t relevant to the situation. They also said, “We’ve thrown all these documents away and all the servers have been destroyed, so it’s impossible for us to submit them to the court.”
When I read that, I thought, “We must have won because they’ve destroyed evidence.” In any Western court, that would’ve been the result. The case would have been thrown out of court. The lawyers and the judges didn’t blink an eye. They kept going. At that point, it becomes a he-said-she-said. If the company has destroyed all the evidence, then you either believe me or you believe the company. In the “legal” justice system in Japan, Mitsubishi will always win.
That’s not how I’m looking at this. I’m looking at it as we’ve had a ten-year battle, but we’ve had paternity leave numbers that have gone from 1% to over 30%. In numbers, that means that millions of babies have gotten to spend time with their dads because of what we’ve done. Millions of babies have probably been born that might never have been born because companies have been forced to recognize the law and allow people to take maternity and paternity leave. From that, I’m eternally grateful. I feel that there’s nothing more gratifying than seeing a win like that.
It’s the win in a different form, which sounds like it was the one you were aiming for in the first place.
More Than A Lawsuit: Winning The Bigger Battle For Change
That’s another reason why I’m continuing this effort and why we’ve published the book.
Let’s get to the book. Tell us a little bit about it. Does it cover your story? What else does it cover? I know you had a co-author. I am curious about the backstory of what led you to finally put the book together after roughly a decade.
This is the third book I’ve written about my situation. It’s the first one that I published. The other two will be treasures for my children, perhaps. These things were so devastating and so shocking for me that I was journaling. I was keeping notes for myself. Some of these things were so unbelievable. The things not only the court did, but the things the company said, and the whole DNA test thing was truth is stranger than fiction. Who on earth would ever believe there’s such a thing? On top of that, the company’s argument was that I was crazy. That’s why they fired me. They said I was crazy. They had me go through all these psychological tests. It was so bizarre that I had to write it all down.
Eventually, though, what I decided to publish is the book Too Big to Care. The purpose of the book is partially to tell my story, but to tell other people’s stories as well. To point out, what does it mean in 2025 to be sustainable as a company? Many people talk about that, and yet I rarely hear a definition for what it means.
Two, if you ask managers on the ground, “What are you doing for sustainability?” Often, you get a blank stare. The purpose of this book was to be somewhat diagnostic as well as prescriptive. “What does it mean in 2025 to be sustainable? If that’s what it means, then what do you have to do? If that’s what you have to do, how much is it going to cost?” That’s everybody’s question.
Everyone has a right to have a family and a career. We sometimes underestimate what employees need to balance both. Share on XWhat I argue in the book is the first principle. The foundation of capitalism or corporate governance is that corporations have to consistently generate outsized profits. That’s the first pillar. The second pillar is that corporations also have a responsibility to add extraordinary value to society. It’s that second pillar that we so often forget. If you think about it, if you’re not generating value to society and to people, then what are you doing as a corporation? Why do you exist?
The real corporations that have existed for a very long time have understood that and are doing both. The purpose of this book is to define what sustainability means in 2025 and to emphasize the fact that by being sustainable, you’re going to increase your profits. Secondly, it is to tell the stories of how to do that and anecdotally show how I’ve seen good examples of companies that have succeeded in being sustainable.
Global Perspectives: Parental Leave Around The World
Some of this does happen at the company level, but to your point about the system in Japan and the culture in Japan, some of it’s also set by national culture. I’m sure you’ve looked at countries that are getting it more right and less right. Who are the ones on both ends of the spectrum?
It’s the full gamut. It’s not just economically based. You might think, “Third-world countries are probably way behind.” That’s not always the case. I often point to the fact that, for example, in the United States, there still isn’t a national maternity leave policy. There’s no guarantee for women in the US that they can have children, which, to me, is very bizarre for a country like the United States. Companies in Northern Europe, Scandinavian countries, probably have it the closest to being right. It’s a very liberal approach to parental leave.
As I argue in the book, I don’t think this is a right or left type of argument or right or left type of decision. Whether you are pro-right or pro-left, allowing people to have a family and a career crosses the aisle. It goes right down the center. Why would you, on either side of the aisle, be against protecting that human right? It doesn’t make any sense.
I’m not living in the United States at the moment, but you see some of this in the US. There is almost a movement to go back to more of the traditional home model, where there is a working father and the stay-at-home mother takes care of the children. Not everybody can afford to do that, but you have some people who are deliberately making that choice almost to make a statement that that’s the way it should be. You do have a little bit of this revisitation of what ultimately was the model of the past, and people wanting that again.
For people who want to do that, it’s a valid choice. For people who don’t think that’s right for them, does that mean that they shouldn’t have parental rights? Absolutely not. If people think what’s right for them is to have both parents working, or for economic reasons, they need to have both parents working, that’s no excuse to deny a family in that situation parental rights. Everyone has a right to have a family and a career. That’s where sometimes we underestimate what we need to do for employees. By not providing that, we miss out on a lot of experience. We miss out on a lot of value add.
I was thinking that we spend millions of dollars on management training programs or coaches for our employees. What better management training program is there than becoming a parent? Some of the best managers I’ve had are people who have been parents. They know how to deal with people through the stages of life because they deal with it every day at home. We underestimate the value of people who have become parents.
There’s this presupposition that says, “She’s got kids. She’s going to be taking days off every time the kid’s sick.” I don’t think that’s the right approach to this. The right to right approach to this is you’ve got an employee who has become more efficient. She’s able to do her work and take care of her family. He is a new dad. He’s able to be a dad and a manager.
In a few years, his kids are going to be out of school, and then he is going to be able to devote even more attention to his job and use all of those experiences he has gleaned over the years or she has gleaned over the years as a parent to add even more value to our corporation. If she’s talking to customers, who’s she talking to? She’s likely talking to people who are parents. If you’re talking about salespeople who can relate to customers, then you probably need people who have parental experience.
If you look at who’s motivated, there are very few employees, I would argue, that are more motivated than new parents. They not only have to take care of themselves, but they have to take care of their family. They have to provide for their family. They’re extraordinarily motivated. If you, as an employer, are supporting those people, you’re going to build loyalty and trust. You’re going to have a bond with those employees that will last for a very long time. How much is that worth? I’d argue that it’s priceless.
People that are against sustainability are against the viability of their company. Share on XThe people who figure out how to make it all work are more efficient. They’re more focused. They have to be. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to keep up with all of it. To your broader point, you don’t have a sustainable society if people are not having children. In the long run, that works against you, but most people can’t think that long-term. They can barely think about the next month.
That is tough to understand. Certainly, if that’s how you’re operating as a corporation, you need to look at sustainability. If you think about the definition of sustainability, what is it? It means your company has an ongoing concern. Sustainable means that you’re going to be around tomorrow at the end of the day. It’s almost an oxymoron. People who are against sustainability, that means you’re against the viability of your company, which is illogical. If you want to be sustainable, then I would argue that’s going to increase your profits. Let’s define what you need to do. It comes back to optimization of resource utilization, and your number one resource is your people.
What else are you doing other than writing the book to raise the level of focus on this topic in terms of advocacy?
We have an online petition that we’ve got over 30,000 signatures for. Also, I started my own company. It is a logistics company called Smart Vision Logistics. I’d encourage everybody, if they have a minute, to take a look at our webpage. We decided to do things differently. We’re the first carbon-zero or carbon-neutral logistics company in the world. We focus on providing services and doing things in a way that other logistics companies don’t. We’ve been very blessed. The business has taken off. We’re happy to see the direction things are going in.
Advice For Parents: Putting Family First In A Demanding World
What advice would you have for fathers or parents in general who are facing similar challenges in Japan or elsewhere?
Family has to come first. It’s such a blessing to be able to have a family, to have kids, and to have a partner. If you don’t put those things first in your life, in the long run, you’ll have a lot of regrets. Likewise, if you do put family first, not only will you be a better parent, but I would argue you’ll be a better worker. At the end of the day, you’ll generate more value, both at home and at work.
This has been a long, ten-year bite. It has become a part of who you are. Is there anything that you would do differently, or would you do it all the same?
I don’t have any regrets, to be honest. I tend to be extraordinarily curious. I have a very strong sense of justice, and I also believe very much in truth. To the extent that, as people, as countries, and as corporations, we can get back to some of those core values of putting people first and being honest and transparent. Hard work and work-life balance, we’ve talked about these things forever. I honestly believe that focusing on those core values will not only increase your value and growth as a person but will make you a better employee. As a corporation, it will make you a stronger corporation and more profitable in the long run.
As a country and as a culture, that’s the key to survival. It’s shocking and sad for me to see a country like Japan facing this demographic situation. It’s unfathomable to think that the population is decreasing by a million people a year. How did we get here? We need to take a look at corporate behavior and this human right of allowing people to have a work-life balance, or a family and a career. Is it that hard to imagine that we could do that as a company and as a culture? I don’t think so. That’s the key.
Parental Rights: Family has to come first. It’s such a blessing to have a family, kids, and a partner. If you don’t put them first, you’ll have a lot of regrets.
Is there any last message you would want to share with people who are still afraid to speak up against the kind of workplace injustice that you experienced?
I don’t think speaking up is for everybody. I feel, through my particular experience, that I was called to do this. I will continue to do this probably for the rest of my life, along with my corporation, children, and other things. Please take a look at my LinkedIn. I often publish on LinkedIn. Please take a look at the book. That’ll give you a lot more details and insights into what it means to be sustainable in 2025 and how to go forward.
I don’t have any regrets. I love what I do. I love my kids. Where do you draw the line? If you’re giving up having a family for a career, does that make sense? Maybe for some people, it does. I’m not precluding that some people might want to have a career more than a family, but that’s how we’ve been programmed as human beings. It is to have a family and to put family first. As a society and as a human, I think it’s important, and it’s the first step towards sustainability.
Well said. We’ll close there. Thank you for doing this. It was very interesting to hear your story and, frankly, a bit disheartening. I give you a lot of credit for fighting the fight that you have fought.
It’s my pleasure. Anybody who’s interested, please feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn. I’m happy to communicate with your readers one-on-one.
Thank you again. Have a good rest of your day.
Thank you. Bye for now.
Take care.
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I’d like to thank Glen for joining me to discuss parental rights and his legal battle for them, his book, Too Big to Care, and his own career journey. As a reminder, this show is brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, please join our community. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Thanks, and have a great day.
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About Glen Wood
