Japan's Astounding Future: Life With Father", David E. Sanger, 7 p.m. New York Times, November 12, 1993. 1993 by The New York Times Company.

Katsuki, JAPAN. The Japanese government is now teaching men how to be better fathers. At 7 p.m. one Friday evening, when men would usually be dutifully at their desks, 40 or so executives have stepped into the company auditorium for the latest in Japanese employee training: a course in the art of being a family man.

The evening lecturer dispensed with all Japanese niceties. "You have to live another 20 or 30 years after you retire. You will lose your title. You will lose your job. You will lose your business card. What is left? Only your children and your wife."

... All over the country the government is holding a series of experimental seminars... Speaking to praise the wonders of a weekend in the Japanese Alps, comedians ridicule the demands of corporate life and everyone is talking about reversing decades of state-sponsored workaholism.

"There is only one hitch," says the Education Ministry Official who drew up the program. "Even with overtime hours declining, worker-bee fathers come home early, they find they have no place. They don't know what to do. They are there, I guess, but they are spiritually non-existent in their houses. This is what we should attack very aggressively."

... Conspiracy theorists who examine each action of the Japanese bureaucracy to discover hidden agendas say the Education Ministry is pretty obvious: to reverse the decline in Japan's birth rate, which now stands at a record low of 1.5 children per woman of reproductive age.

The thinking goes like this: The birth rate is dropping because women are marrying later and going back to work earlier. If men become involved in raising children, the women should become less reluctant to have children.

The task of re-educating Japanese men falls to experts like Yoshihiro Onoue, a former high school teacher now working for the Osaka Prefectural Board of Education. Mr. Onoue's Job is to find speakers to travel to the companies: he says education officials in some towns are even bringing in comedians to parody the life of the overworked "salaryman." He is accustomed to having doors slammed in his face when he tells companies what he has in mind.

"When you look at the conditions in Japan today, you still have corporate warrior fathers imprisoned by the company," he said with a shrug, "some companies want to keep it that way."

But he sees some hope for change. The recession has hastened the arrival of the five-day workweek, and companies will probably find it difficult to go back to the six-day week when the economy recovers. There is even talk of moving national holidays around to create more three-day weekends.

At one manufacturer, the men who came to the government-sponsored session said they found it long on bromides and short on practical advice on escaping the workplace and becoming more involved at home.

Hiroshi Sato, a 45-year-old executive with two children, crinkled his nose as he was warned of the dangers of karoshi, or death from overwork. The picture of work-all-day, drink-all-night life in Japan he thought, was a bit overdrawn.

Younger men seem more intense. "It's my duty to become a skillful father, and the Government really can't help me," said Shoichi Hayashida, a 35 year old father of three children. "But the reality is that I am too busy working."

Nonetheless, "the company is making great progress, they are even introducing flex-time this summer for the first time," said a leader for what passes as a labor union at one company. "It's a matter of survival," he says. "If we don't catch up with this trend as a company, no one will come work here."