Yuki Tanaka, a graduate of the University of Tokyo’s Faculty of Economics, entered a foreign investment bank at age 24 on an annual salary of 11 million yen. He resigned nine months later and started building his own embroidery brand from a single sewing machine. BlockTempo uses his story to frame a broader question: why some young people no longer want to work at a company.
From a high-paying bank job to an embroidery startup
The report says Tanaka earned 11 million yen a year, which it converts to about NT$2.2 million, or roughly NT$180,000 a month.
After leaving the bank, he began learning embroidery from scratch and founded Take Risk in 2024. A Japanese magazine described his embroidery studio as having become a popular brand.
BlockTempo argues that the case is often used to answer a question heard from business owners and older generations: why young people do not want to work in companies, or why companies struggle to hire them.
Long hours, little sleep, and the sense of being a replaceable part
The article groups the reasons into two main categories. One is long working hours, chronic lack of sleep, and the frustration of feeling like a small part in a larger machine. The other is that life outside a company can, for some people, offer another way to get by.
Tanaka gave a detailed account of why he quit. When he first joined, he mainly updated client stock prices and organized financial conditions. Much of the work meant staring at Excel for extended periods. Senior colleagues told him to rely entirely on keyboard shortcuts and not even touch the mouse, so he could save as much time as possible for sleep.
His workday started at 10 a.m. and ran until 11 p.m. Around midnight, he and colleagues from the same intake class would go to a convenience store to buy food, and he often did not get a taxi home until 2 a.m. From 10 a.m. to 2 a.m., the day stretched across 16 hours. At the busiest point, he said he worked at least 36 hours straight and did not even have time to shower.
At his worst, he slept four hours a day. Because two straight days on four hours of sleep was already his physical limit, he put himself on a cycle of four hours, four hours, then six hours across three days. That added up to 14 hours over three days, or less than five hours a day on average. The article says he spent so long without seeing sunrise that he gradually lost his sense of the changing seasons.
The office culture added another burden. Even on days with no active deals, people could have left at 5 p.m., but nobody did because the whole floor was staying late. Those with no tasks would still sit in the office until midnight, effectively spending seven extra hours there.
Layoff pressure and the culture around it
Pressure also came from layoffs. Tanaka said first-year hires were in a training period and would not be cut, but from the second year onward they could be dismissed at any time. On one occasion, after New York headquarters issued a layoff order, a manager widely respected by the team was gone the next day. Tanaka also said he saw a colleague get tapped on the shoulder by a superior and never return to the desk.
Managers told staff that because they could be fired at any time, they should live as fully as possible while in the industry. Colleagues responded by buying luxury cars and expensive watches with their high salaries, and by going out for premium beef in Roppongi after closing big deals.
Tanaka said the job gradually made him feel like AI, someone who simply processed assigned tasks without understanding the purpose behind the work. He could also see that the people who stayed and won promotions were the ones who could still define their role under extreme conditions and suggest improvements to managers. He felt he might have had that ability too, but could not bring it out.
He submitted his resignation in month nine
About six months into the job, Tanaka’s manager noticed how worn down he looked and asked whether he wanted to take leave. He had already been planning to start a business and originally wanted to stay at least one full year to save some capital. In the end, though, he handed in his resignation in the ninth month, three months earlier than his own target.
The turning point came during a break when he and five close peers from the same hiring class happened to take time off together and went to Hakone for a hot spring trip. There, Tanaka realized he had not laughed so freely in a very long time. In that moment, he felt he had no regret left about leaving the company.
He returned from Hakone on a Sunday and called his parents that night to say he would resign the next day. They supported the decision. On Monday morning, he submitted his resignation to his manager.
What made the post-exit path possible
The article says Tanaka did have several advantages. He had long planned to start a business before resigning. His fixed living costs were also low: rent was 70,000 yen a month, and he lived in a room measuring four-and-a-half tatami mats. A sewing machine was his starting point. The report compares that rent with his previous monthly income, saying 70,000 yen was less than one-tenth of the roughly 920,000 yen implied by his annual salary.
His resume also mattered. A University of Tokyo degree plus experience at a foreign investment bank was enough to make people stop and pay attention online. Family support was another condition, reflected in that Sunday night call to his parents.
Tanaka started learning embroidery from a point where he had never even handled an iron. He documented the process on social media, and one of the videos reached several million views. According to his new book, his Instagram account, @kitaku_shishu_official, now has more than 180,000 followers.
The direct translation of the book title is Why I Graduated From the University of Tokyo, Quit an 11 Million Yen Salary, and Started Embroidery. BlockTempo says the key point is not only the “reason” in the title, but the “conditions” behind the move. The article also argues that part of what Tanaka is selling is the process itself: a University of Tokyo graduate leaving investment banking to learn embroidery was, even before the work matured, enough to keep people watching.
For that reason, the article says Tanaka’s case can show only that some people are able to keep living after leaving a company. It does not show that the conditions required to do so are widely shared, and it should not be used to persuade others to resign.
Those who stay, and those who cannot get in
BlockTempo also cites labor data from Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, saying that in 2025, one-third of new graduates left their jobs within three years. Put differently, about two-thirds were still with their original employer three years later.
The article says those who remain inside companies choose endurance. The odd tension of the current era, it adds, is that people inside want to get out, while people outside want to get in.
On that second point, the report refers to an earlier item citing research from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab in the United States. Using U.S. wage data, the study found that for workers aged 22 to 25, job opportunities in occupations with high AI exposure were 19% lower than for peers in less-exposed occupations. Before 2025, the gap was 15%. The article says the main reason is that automation tied to AI has reduced companies’ demand for entry-level hiring.
Other figures cited in the article
- The three-year resignation rate for new university hires in Japan was 33.8%, compared with 34.9% a year earlier.
- Only 8% of Japanese employees were engaged at work, less than half the East Asia average of 18%.
Alongside Tanaka’s story, the piece also references Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby, the Scrivener, quoting the line 「I would prefer not to」 as a comparison for the detachment many young workers feel today.