After years espousing the workaholic drudgery of the salaryman’s lot, the Japanese public and private sectors have embarked on a “quality of life” drive aimed at making the country a more appealing place to work and raise families.

A variety of schemes, including substantial cash incentives for families with more than four children, have been announced this week and analysts predicted that many more companies may effectively be “shamed” into following suit.

One senior government source told The Times that the sudden appearance of the schemes was the long-awaited sign that Japan was treating its low birthrate as an emergency.

Matsushita, Japan’s biggest electronics conglomerate and a company that used to insist that its workers attend mass exercise sessions every morning, has taken the radical step of allowing most of its 30,000 employees to work from home as telecommuters.

SoftBank, the communications group that bought Vodafone’s Japanese subsidiary last year, said on Tuesday that it would offer £25,000 to any family producing a fifth child — a dramatic shift from the company’s previous “incentive” of about £60 for each child born to staff families.

Paternity leave is rare and in much of the private sector it is still widely assumed that women will permanently quit their jobs when they become pregnant. A more general prejudice is that women will not return to work if there are elderly parents that need to be cared for — an increasing likelihood in the developed world’s fastest-greying population.

SoftBank’s plan comes only a day after the Defence Ministry — a branch of the bureaucracy that has always prided itself on its machismo — said that it would open a 24-hour childcare centre for members of the Self Defence Forces stationed in Setagaya, Tokyo.

The plans, which are expected to spread into other ministries, come after a series of experiments carried out in local government offices throughout Japan. Some towns forced fathers to take a minimum of six weeks a year off to spend more time with their children.

The Defence Ministry is also understood to have taken its lead in this from the numerous private railway lines that crisscross the capital and serve the suburbs of Tokyo and beyond.

Worried that the shrinking workforce will result in falling commuter revenues, railway companies such as Keio and Keihin Electric Express Railway have been frantically building childcare centres near their stations. The plan is to offer parents and young, dual income families an alternative to the government-run childcare centres, which are sparsely distributed and heavily oversubscribed. The railways hope to build combination daycare centres and luxury flats above and around their stations eventually to attract young families as older residents leave for the countryside.

The Matsushita mass telecommuting scheme will allow about 20,000 of its staff to work from home two or three times a week and follows similar policy shifts at other IT companies, Toyota and NEC.

Many believe that Matsushita’s new policy may force a deeper change in corporate Japan, which praises long hours as the surest measure of an employee’s worth. Analysts believe that as well as engendering a more family-friendly work-life balance, the scheme may persuade managers to evaluate staff on the quality of their work, rather than a simple count of hours on the job.

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