This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.
Japan's revised Childcare and Family Care Leave Act took effect on April 1, 2022, creating new paternity leave provisions designed to make it genuinely feasible for men to take time off after a child's birth. But the gap between stated intention and practice remains wide: approximately 80% of male new-hire employees say they want to take parental leave, while actual male take-up rates remain around 13%. The most commonly cited barrier is the difficulty of finding coverage.
In this context, TIMEWELL co-founder and COO Taiya Narihide — who works under the company's mission of "expanding life choices" — took roughly six weeks of paternity leave. What makes the story interesting is that it almost didn't happen: Taiya wasn't planning to take leave at all. The person who changed his mind was TIMEWELL co-founder and CEO Hamamoto Ryuta.
Here is Hamamoto's perspective.
Encouraging Leave Because It Was the Right Thing to Do
Hamamoto: Right after the birth, Taiya was swamped — he wasn't even able to carve out a few hours here and there. We are a company whose name literally means "time well spent," and our mission is for people to feel genuinely fulfilled in how they use their time. Watching someone in a situation where external demands leave almost no room for personal choice — that felt wrong to me.
I told him directly: "Taking proper leave and focusing on your family will make everyone happier in the long run." I sent him an actual message saying that.
And there was something else I realized: someone like Taiya — busy with work, unable to take the leave he's technically entitled to — is exactly the kind of person our company exists to help. If we could make it work for him, it would prove we could solve the same problem for clients in similar situations.
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An Employee's Absence Is a Chance to Grow
Hamamoto: I'd be lying if I said losing Taiya for six weeks wasn't a little daunting. But I think a leader who can't absorb that kind of disruption hasn't earned the role.
There's someone I respect enormously — Hidesji Hamaguchi, formerly of Panasonic — who once told me: "If you want to build real capability, take on five projects. And when that gets hard, add two more." The idea is that going from five to seven feels impossible at first, but when you come out the other side, your actual capacity has grown. That's how I try to operate.
So I looked at Taiya's absence as the "five to seven" moment. When I came through it, I'd be genuinely more capable. I found myself thinking — honestly — "Thank you for giving me the chance to grow."
Outsourcing Part of the Handoff Through Our Own Service
Hamamoto: That said, I'm not going to pretend it would have been comfortable if I'd had to absorb every single one of Taiya's responsibilities personally. That would have been rough.
What made it manageable was using TIMEWELL's own online assistant service to delegate roughly 30% of Taiya's work to one of our professional assistants. Knowing that 10 units of incoming work would actually arrive as 7 — that changes the mental frame completely.
Our professional assistants are remarkably reliable. They take clear instructions, complete work on time, and nothing falls through the cracks. That reliability is not a given — it is genuinely valuable. I was reminded how much operational capacity that kind of support creates.
This Is Bigger Than One Company
Hamamoto: TIMEWELL's vision is to build the world's leading "challenge infrastructure" — a system that lets people pursue what they want without having to give up something else.
For most people, "challenge" is not grand or dramatic. It's small. For me, this specific challenge was creating the conditions for Taiya to take leave. For Taiya, the challenge was actually taking it.
A challenge is simply refusing to accept the thing you've been telling yourself you have to give up. And that applies to everyone. "I can't take time for my family because of work." "I can't continue working because of caregiving responsibilities." If those trade-offs are forced rather than chosen, we think that represents a failure — a "time hell" where work, family, and personal interests are all losing.
That's why TIMEWELL exists: to add options. Our online assistant service can reduce someone's monthly overtime from 100 hours to 30 hours. That's a real change in the decisions available to a person. And for someone returning to work after maternity or paternity leave, working as one of our professional assistants can be the right re-entry path.
When I think about both sides of that equation — the person who needs more time, and the person who needs re-entry — I believe this business has real work to do for Japan. People should be able to have both the career and the life they want. If TIMEWELL is part of how someone gets there, that matters to me.
This article is produced by TIMEWELL, which supports businesses dealing with workforce gaps caused by parental leave, resignations, or mental health challenges.
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