Bandai Namco reportedly tries to bore staff into quitting, skirting Japan’s labor laws

The next time you feel dehumanized by rumors of surprise HR meetings popping up on calendars amidst layoff rumors, be glad you don’t work at game studio Bandai Namco in Japan. 

Like other video game studios, Bandai Namco has been forced to confront an industry slowdown lately that many companies have reacted to by laying employees off to cut costs. That’s easier said than done in Japan, where incredibly strict labor laws make it near impossible to fire all but the worst employees, and where layoffs are a rarity. 

Canceling some game projects and shuttering existing ones has helped, but facing the need for further adjustments, Bandai Namco has reportedly turned to the unspoken Japanese tradition of layoff-by-boredom by stuffing unwanted employees into oidashi beya, or “expulsion rooms.” 

Employees banished reassigned to oidashi beya are left to do nothing, or given menial tasks at best. According to Bloomberg’s unnamed insider sources, Bandai Namco has moved around 200 of its 1,300 person team to these rooms in recent months. 

The goal of sticking someone in an expulsion room is to literally bore or shame them into quitting, and Bloomberg’s sources claim it has worked on around half the people Bandai Namco has stuck in there so far. 

Do a quick online search for oidashi beya and you’ll see plenty of websites explaining the practice, or otherwise discussing how difficult it is to fire people in Japan thanks to strong labor protections. It’s not a new practice, either: For those that haven’t been reading the Reg for the past 11 years, we even wrote about it way back in 2013 as a wave of the practice swept through Japan and hit tech workers at companies reportedly including Panasonic, Sony and other firms. 

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Bandai Namco, for its part, has denied that it’s engaged in trying to bore people out the door, telling Bloomberg that it canceled games earlier this year based on assessments of the various projects and idle staff are simply waiting for new projects. 

“Some employees may need to wait a certain amount of time before they are assigned their next project, but we do move forward with assignments as new projects emerge,” a spokesperson told the news service. “There is no organization like an ‘oidashi beya’ at Bandai Namco Studios designed to pressure people to leave voluntarily.”

We reached out to Bandai Namco for comment, but haven’t heard back. 

Mass layoffs have been happening everywhere since companies had to rebalance following the COVID-19 pandemic, and continue into the present at many large firms. The video game industry and wider tech world haven’t been exempt at all, with thousands of jobs cut at Dell, IBM and others in recent months.

But hey, at least they just kick people out the door in the States – for the most part, anyhow. ®