Salarymen who quit are not likely to be salarymen again
This I don't think is true anyway. It has always seemed to me like a socially manufactured platitude to keep people erring as much on the side of safety as they can possibly reach. For the average person, it might be a very reasonable default, which is why the platitude tends to stick.
Otherwise, I don't know if the social reservations are worth worrying so much about. It's hard to tell how much of this is people legitimately looking out for you, and how much is them preemptive prevention from having to envy you and what you did that they couldn't bring themselves to do.
Here in Japan, this socially manufactured platitude has real teeth. I'll explain the long version some other day if you're interested, but the short version is that it is extraordinarily difficult to land a seishain (full-time company employee) job if you've ever voluntarily left one before, and keiyaku shain (contract employee) is a materially worse status in a lot of important respects.
I have a... quirky relationship to these social norms as a foreigner, but that is another topic altogether.
This I don't think is true anyway. It has always seemed to me like a socially manufactured platitude to keep people erring as much on the side of safety as they can possibly reach. For the average person, it might be a very reasonable default, which is why the platitude tends to stick.
Otherwise, I don't know if the social reservations are worth worrying so much about. It's hard to tell how much of this is people legitimately looking out for you, and how much is them preemptive prevention from having to envy you and what you did that they couldn't bring themselves to do.