Sakai, a shy 35-year-old with thick, curly black hair and an equally thick stubborn streak, turned them down on the spot: He felt his performance was fine.

Three days later, Sega told Sakai to take home all personal belongings, turn in all company property and report to an office dubbed the `Pasona Room', after the English word personnel. He arrived to find the room empty, except for a desk, three chairs, a bare locker and a telephone that couldn't make outside calls. Sakai was given no work to perform and allowed no diversions. He was being laid off, Japanese style. ``I'm not going to be able to hold out for a day of this,'' Sakai recalls thinking. Months later, however, he was still clocking 40 hours a week there.

Cases like Sakai's arepopping up as corporate Japan belatedly gets serious about trimming bloated white-collar work forces. Companies have stepped up their restructuring efforts even as the country's economy has started showing signs of growth again after years of recession. The jobless rate here has jumped to 4.9 per cent, the highest since Japan started keeping statistics in 1953, and many economists expect the rate to continue rising.

But while the country's famed system of lifetime employment is beginning to crumble, social taboos and legal constraints still make it tough to dismiss workers outright. As a result, employers are devising creative ways of nudging people out the door, and workers are hanging on to their jobs are dear life.

Indeed, Sakai, whom Sega ultimately fired in March, has gone to court in an effort to recover his job. In a law-suit that's unusual for Japan, he contends that his firing was invalid because the company offered no facts to support its allegations that he performed poorly and had no hope ofimprovement.

Sega, whose earnings began tumbling two years ago, describes Sakai as a troublemaker. He didn't file expense reports on time, was rude on the phone and once, in 1990, overslept and missed his flight for a business trip, it says in documents filed in response to Sakai's law-suit. Sakai, who joined Sega nine years ago and worked in the department that supervises the young game fanatics who test Sega's products, admits to missing the flight but denies the other allegations.

When he reported to the Pasona Room at Sega headquarters here on December 10, Sakai had written orders to stay in the room every day from precisely 8:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. He had 55 minutes off for lunch. His instructions barred him from bringing in personal belongings. (Sega says that clause wasn't meant to be taken literally.)

The room was spotless and silent, Sakai recalls. The phone, which almost never rang, had a digital clock that he watched constantly. ``It's a long time until 5:15,'' he says.

Sakai resolved tostick it out. But soon he was spending most of his days in the room fretting about his future. Now and then, he would get up from his chair to do leg bends or lie on the floor to stretch his back. At night he would walk to his apartment, where he lives alone, and sit in a stupor with the TV set on. He says he tried picking up novels or books on English history, in which he holds a master's degree, but he would wind up reading the same paragraph over and over.

In early January, three other Sega employees joined Sakai in the Pasona Room, say he and officials of his Sega labor union. One was quickly reassigned, but two others stayed on through the month. One subject dominated the men's conversation--``Why are we in here?''--but they could come up with no answer, Sakai says. After a month, one of his two remaining colleagues quit, and the other was fired in mid-February, Sakai's union says. (Sega acknowledges it assigned Sakai and a number of other workers to this and other such rooms, but it won't confirm theunion's estimate of about 10 people in all or comment on those cases.)

At the end of January, the personnel department formally recommended to Sakai that he quit. This time Sega offered a reduced severance payment of 2.36 million yen. Again, Sakai refused. Realising he was on the verge of being canned, he joined the smaller of Sega's two employee unions, which is affiliated with the pro-labour Japan Communist Party. Union leaders seized upon Sakai's cause as crucial to preserving jobs at Sega.

``You're a valuable person for us,'' a union official, Keiichi Hirose, tells him during an interview at the union's office.

But Sakai himself is no agitator. ``Doesn't anyone else want to fight?'' he protests. The tail of his checkered shirt hangs out over his plump frame as he chain-smokes cigarettes. ``There's something wrong with Japanese people,'' mutters Hirose.

On February 18, Sega dropped a bombshell: It notified Sakai through the union that it was firing him, effective March 31, and would pay him 3.34million yen, according to the severance letter he later received. But for the next month and a half, he continued to report to the Pasona Room as directed, he and his union say.

The stress mounted. Sakai says he snapped at store clerks over trivial matters. He slept as little as two hours a night. He lost his appetite and nibbled ice-cream bars for lunch, about the only food he could stomach. Another Sega worker assigned to a Pasona Room says he, too, started going nuts after a couple days.

``There's no stimulation,'' says the other employee, who asks not to be named. ``It's just negative thinking--and more negative thinking.''

Sakai filed a suit against Sega in Tokyo district Court on March 25, seeking to keep his job and his old salary. On April 1, he went to the office as usual. A guard with whom he had long traded friendly chitchat stopped him, he says, and apologetically told him: ``We can't let you in.''

In late April, Sega announced a plan to cut its work force by one-quarter, or 1,000employees, by next year. By June, 750 employees had accepted severance packages. Sakai claims that Sega used the Pasona Room to frighten others into taking its buyout offers. ``Everyone's afraid they might be the next to be thrown into solitary confinement,'' he says.

Not so, says Shunichi Nakamura, a Sega executive vice-president in charge of personnel and administration. The employees weren't assigned to the Pasona Room as a way of forcing them out, he says, though he acknowledges that most of the Pasona workers ended up leaving the company. Sega's big buyout plan worked, Nakamura says, because the severance packages were generous.

Then why the Pasona Rooms? Nakamura says Sega stationed Sakai in one until it determined whether a job for him might pop up elsewhere. Japanese customs and law generally make it difficult to fire poorly performing workers straightaway, Nakamura adds, ``but the times are unmistakably headed in that direction.''

The success of the early departure program, Sega executives say,means the company can now focus on selling its flagship Dreamcast game machine, which was launched in the US last week.

Sakai, meanwhile, spends his days preparing documents for his court case. He isn't looking for another job, figuring that doing so would hurt his chances of getting reinstated at Sega. But in Japan's slow-moving court system, it may be years before he gets a verdict.

Why not move on? Sakai purses his lips in determination. ``If I say, `OK, fine, I quit','' he says, ``I'm no better than a cow or a horse.''

(The Asian Wall Street Journal)