It’s not.

What I meant was you can dismiss people for poor performance, but that’s the only valid reason. You cannot lay people off in Japan in the sense of “we cut the budget and decided we don’t want to employ you anymore.”

However, that said… if you want to lay someone off, you can jump through a million hoops. I have seen people relegated to ridiculously inappropriate roles to convince them to leave. You can also mess with non-salary compensation if you want. And you can offer generous severance. And maybe you can convince people to let you “lay them off.”