In February 2025, I wrote about something in Japan that I found difficult to imagine.

People were paying companies to quit their jobs for them.

These businesses are called taishoku daikō—resignation agencies. Instead of telling your employer that you’re leaving, you contact an agency and they deliver the message for you.

Coming from Switzerland and having spent most of my working life in the Netherlands, the idea seemed strange to me.

Why would an adult pay someone to say, “I quit”?

More than a year later, I decided to look at it again.

And I discovered that I had misunderstood what people were actually paying for.

You don’t need permission to quit

The first thing I wanted to understand was whether quitting a job in Japan is legally difficult.

Generally, it isn’t.

For an employee with an indefinite-term employment contract, Japan’s Civil Code provides that either party can terminate the employment relationship by giving notice. For an employee resigning, the contract generally ends two weeks after notice is given.

There are complications. Fixed-term contracts are different, company procedures matter, and individual circumstances can become more complicated.

But an employer doesn’t generally have the power to simply say:

“No. You aren’t allowed to resign.”

That immediately made resignation agencies seem even stranger.

If workers already have the right to leave, what are they paying the agency to do?

The legal right isn’t always the problem

Then I looked at why people actually use these services.

A 2024 Mynavi survey asked 800 people who had used resignation agencies about their reasons.

The most common answer was that their employer had tried, or they expected their employer to try, to prevent them from resigning.

Another common reason was that they didn’t feel they were in an environment where they could say they wanted to quit.

There have also been reports of employers ignoring resignation letters, pressuring employees to remain, demanding that they find their own replacement or intimidating them when they try to leave.

That changed the question for me.

These people weren’t necessarily paying someone to give them the right to resign.

They already had that.

They were paying someone to create distance from what happened when they exercised that right.

What are they actually buying?

Imagine that I’ve decided to leave my job.

I know I’m legally allowed to resign.

But I also know what will happen when I tell my manager.

Why are you leaving?

Can’t you stay another six months?

We’re already short-staffed.

What about your colleagues?

Who will take over your work?

You can’t leave now.

Perhaps the conversation becomes uncomfortable.

Perhaps I’ve already tried having it.

Perhaps my manager is one of the reasons I’m leaving.

Suddenly, paying someone else to deliver a decision I’ve already made doesn’t seem quite as difficult to understand.

I’m not buying permission.

I’m buying a buffer.

Is this because Japanese people avoid confrontation?

That’s an attractive explanation.

Japan has hierarchical workplaces. There can be strong expectations around responsibility to colleagues, loyalty and not causing trouble for others. Telling a superior that you’re leaving can be uncomfortable.

So it would be easy to conclude:

Japanese people don’t like confrontation, therefore resignation agencies exist.

I’ve become increasingly cautious about explanations like that.

If avoiding confrontation were enough to explain the industry, why did commercial resignation agencies become prominent only relatively recently?

Japanese workplace hierarchy existed long before 2017.

Something else changed.

One of the pioneers of the modern resignation-agency business, EXIT, started operating in 2017 and attracted widespread attention the following year.

Once people discovered that paying someone to resign on their behalf was possible, the service itself became part of the solution.

Smartphones made arranging it remotely easy.

Attitudes toward staying with one employer have been changing.

And Japan’s labor shortage created another interesting pressure.

A labor shortage can make leaving harder too

I usually think of a labor shortage as good for employees.

When workers are difficult to find, employees have more choices. Companies have to compete for them, and changing jobs should become easier.

But there is another side.

If workers are difficult to replace, employers also have a stronger incentive to keep the ones they already have.

That can make a resignation particularly inconvenient for the employer.

A manager who is already understaffed may have good practical reasons for desperately wanting someone to stay.

Those reasons don’t remove the employee’s right to leave.

But they can make the conversation harder.

The same labor shortage can therefore make finding another job easier while making an employer more reluctant to lose you.

I hadn’t considered that before.

Not everyone using these services is inexperienced

I had also imagined resignation agencies mainly as something very young workers might use because they lacked the confidence to have a difficult conversation.

The numbers complicate that assumption too.

Research and surveys show that people in their twenties make up a large proportion of users, but people in their thirties and forties use resignation agencies as well.

Some have changed jobs before.

Some have already tried communicating with their employer.

Some report harassment or other workplace problems.

That matters because there is a big difference between:

“I don’t know how to tell my boss I’m leaving.”

and:

“I’ve dealt with my boss long enough to know that I don’t want to have this conversation with them.”

From outside, both people appear to be avoiding the same conversation.

Their reasons may be completely different.

But what can a resignation agency actually do?

This is where the business becomes legally more interesting.

An ordinary resignation agency can communicate a person’s decision.

For example:

“Karl has decided to resign. Here is his resignation notice.”

But imagine I also want someone to say:

“Karl is owed unpaid overtime. He wants his unused leave dealt with this way. He disputes the amount you’re demanding from him. Negotiate these conditions before he leaves.”

That’s no longer simply delivering a message.

It can become legal negotiation.

And an ordinary commercial resignation agency doesn’t automatically have the legal authority to do that.

Japan’s Attorney Act restricts providing certain legal services for compensation to qualified lawyers. Labor unions have different possibilities in labor negotiations, while lawyers can represent clients in legal disputes.

So “resignation agency” can describe services with very different legal capabilities.

And in 2026, that distinction became impossible to ignore.

What happened to Momuri?

Momuri became one of Japan’s best-known resignation agencies.

Its name comes from mō muri—something like “I can’t take it anymore.”

The company handled thousands of resignations and became almost synonymous with the growing industry.

Then police began investigating it.

In October 2025, Momuri’s offices were searched over suspected violations of Japan’s Attorney Act.

In February 2026, the president of the company operating Momuri and his wife were arrested.

But this detail is important.

They weren’t arrested simply because they operated a resignation agency.

Police alleged that the company had referred customers requiring legal services to lawyers and received referral fees in return.

The case therefore exposed precisely the boundary I had just been trying to understand.

Communicating someone’s resignation is one thing.

Providing or arranging compensated legal representation can be another.

What looked like an extremely simple business—telling someone’s employer “I quit”—wasn’t quite so simple after all.

The agency isn’t really the interesting part

When I first encountered resignation agencies, I focused on the employee.

Why couldn’t they just quit themselves?

Why couldn’t they have one uncomfortable conversation?

Why would anyone pay for something they could do for free?

Those questions made the employee seem like the unusual part of the story.

Now I’m not so sure.

If someone knows they have the legal right to leave but is still willing to pay a stranger so they don’t have to communicate directly with their employer, perhaps the interesting thing isn’t that they hired an agency.

Perhaps it’s the relationship they were trying to escape.

That doesn’t mean every employer involved is abusive.

Some people dislike confrontation.

Some may simply prefer convenience.

Others may use an agency because they want the resignation completed quickly and cleanly.

There isn’t one explanation for every person.

But when enough people are willing to pay for distance that an entire industry develops to provide it, the phenomenon tells us something.

Leaving isn’t always the difficult part

I started this investigation wondering why someone would pay a stranger to quit their job for them.

Legally, many of them could simply leave.

That wasn’t what they were buying.

They were buying someone to stand between themselves and the final interaction with an employer they had already decided to leave.

Sometimes that may be unnecessary.

Sometimes it may be avoidance.

And sometimes the existence of that buffer may be exactly what makes leaving feel possible.

I still find resignation agencies unusual.

But I no longer find them inexplicable.

Instead, they have left me with a different question.

What kind of relationship makes telling someone you’re leaving harder than leaving itself?

Sources

My original article on resignation agencies in Japan
https://karltschoppnavarat.com/2025/02/20/

Tokyo Labour Bureau, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare — resignation and dismissal
https://jsite.mhlw.go.jp/tokyo-foreigner/english/seekers_1/spec/spec_1d.html

Nippon.com, Why Japanese Workers Are Using Resignation Agencies to Quit Their Jobs
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g02566/

The Guardian, Japanese workers turn to resignation agencies to help them quit jobs
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/19/japan-workers-resignation-agencies-quit-job-work-life

EXIT — resignation agency
https://www.taishokudaikou.com/

Ito Juku, explanation of resignation agencies and the Attorney Act
https://column.itojuku.co.jp/sharosi/basic/taishokudaikou/

TV Asahi, Momuri-related Attorney Act case
https://news.tv-asahi.co.jp/news_society/articles/000508302.html