We can buy anything in the middle of the night when you live in Japan. Grocery stores and pharmacies are open everyday. Life is easy as a consumer, but when we are a worker in Japan, things change.
Despite the amazing hospitality spirit that people praise about Japanese companies, we are sadly also known as overworked and burn out workers, who work so hard up to the point that they decide to end their life.
That’s why it was surprising to hear the news that several major department stores decided to close on January 1, an important New Year holiday in Japan. They opened the next day, but in the land of shops opening 365 days, it was a big change. The article says that it was a step towards sustainable working conditions in Japan.
With technological advancement that made work easier, it is strange that we keep working so many hours and can’t enjoy vacation days. It is a paradox that we need to face, if we want to move forward towards sustainable working conditions.
In your opinion, how many hours a week should we spend working? How many vacation days should we get a year?
Japan’s history with overworking workers
The Japanese economy has developed from the sweat and tears of hard working and devoted workers. When the economy was flourishing, people were happy to work hard because they could enjoy the fruits of their work, compensated directly in their paychecks.
Now with the economic stagnation, we can’t keep up with working as hard as the previous generation. We put many hours to work without being property compensated. There are so many hours unpaid overwork, causing workers to burn out. There is even a word, “karouhi,” which literally means death by overworking.
You might wonder why Japanese workers work to death. It actually comes from the ancient family system, called the Ie system, dated back to the Edo period (Tachibana 2017: 136-144). To serve the house (ie), people showed their loyalty by devoting selflessly to their chef. Though severely criticized after World War II, the samurai ethical code of “messhi hōkō (destruction of private interest for the public good)” still remains strongly in Japan today. Japanese corporations stand like a family system, asking their workers for their entire devotion. Workers show devotion by working overtime, showing that they are always available without asking for anything in return. Bosses usually choose the employees who are the most devoted to the company for promotion, leaving them no choice but to put hours of available time for their work and work related activities, like drinking with their bosses.
The average hours of work per week in Japan is between 36 to 39 hours (JILPT 2023). Workers take the average of 12 days of paid vacation days a year (Nihon Keizai Shinbun 2024). Compared to France or Germany in which workers take 27 or 29 days of paid vacation, Japanese workers still feel the pressure to be available for their employers, even if it means having less vacation time to rest.
Women’s struggle in workplace
Japan ranks low in gender equality, because only few women get promoted and can access the higher positions in Japanese corporations. Educated and well-trained female workers struggle in the workplace, especially once they have children (Tachibana 2017:41-42). Female workers can lead the same career path as men as long as they don’t have children. Once they have children, they are led to “Mother Track,” separating them from male workers and other female childless workers.
Because Japanese corporations demand selfless devotion from their workers, mothers have a hard time completely devoting themselves to their company. Male directors and managers know that. Therefore they show kindness to mothers by providing them more flexible working conditions, so that they can spend more time taking care of their home and children. Once they accept this kindness, they find out that they are getting less important jobs, moving them further away from future promotions.
Men are also working extra hours to get promoted, leaving them unable to participate in household chores and to take care of their children. For a sustainable working future, it is important that people have enough time to spend raising children if they choose to, without being punished for their choices.
Towards the sustainable future of work
The decision that led the several Japanese department stores to close their stores on January 1 was motivated by the lack of potential workers. With the decreasing population, Japanese companies have a hard time recruiting new workers. They now need to offer better working conditions to attract workers. But how many hours a week should we work in the future?
In 1930, John Mayer Keynes predicted that people would only work 15 hours a week by 2030, since technological advancement would liberate us from working long hours to satisfy our basic needs. We are 5 years away from this prediction, but we are still working 30 to 40 hours a week (World Population Review 2024).
We are only counting paid work to earn a living. There is also other unpaid work that we do everyday. We work to maintain our house clean. We cook to nourish our family. Some of us work to take care of children or elderly. If we count unpaid work, we are surely working more than 30 hours a week.
The balance between work and leisure
When we think about ideal and sustainable working hours, we need to know what counts us as work. In Japanese language, the word “Shigoto (work)” mainly refers to paid work. That may be the reason why it is hard for us to consider that we also have unpaid work, such as taking care of children or elderly, mostly provided by women.
The notion of “work” in English extends more broadly. It refers to paid work as well as other activities. We say exercising as “work out.” We can also “work on our relationship” when things don’t go well. So how do we know what is work and what is not?
We may consider “work” as something that we don’t take pleasure from, but some people enjoy the work they do. Because it is a work, it doesn’t have to be unpleasurable.
The best way to define work is to consider it as the activities that aim to increase “objective or intersubjective values” in the world (Cholbi 2022). When we work, we are thinking about others and the society. We add value to society from our work. When we are taking care of children or elderly, our activities aim to help others. Even when we are working out, we are thinking about how our body looks to the world.
Leisure, on the contrary, is an activity that has a “subjective value” (Cholbi 2022). We do leisurely activities because we experience the subjective pleasure of doing these activities. We can experience the joy of playing sports. We can enjoy cooking or reading. We can’t ask other people to do those activities for us, because it defeats the purpose. We must be the one who is doing the activities.
Some people are lucky to have a paying job which is also a leisure for them. They enjoy working, not because of the paycheck or how they are contributing to society, but because of the joy of doing the activity. Non-paid work can also be a form of leisure, if we take pleasure in the process of cooking or spending time with children.
Unfortunately most of the time, our work is just work and not leisure. The companies ask us to make results from our work, forcing us to focus on the objective values. We might have no choice but to do the work that we don’t enjoy for financial reasons. Cooking or taking care of children and elderly can be a burden, if we focus on pleasing others instead of enjoying the experience.
I notice that the same activities, that I used to enjoy, can feel like work, when I am forced to focus on what these activities mean to others or to society. I love reading, but it feels like work if I know that I will be tested on it.
I know that we all need to focus on making positive contributions to people around us and to society in which we live, but I also feel that we need time for us to just do something we enjoy.
In the land of selfless devotion to the public good, it is hard to allow ourselves to take leisure time or simply enjoy our work. If we can spend the same number of hours on the activities that we intrinsically enjoy as the hours of work, it is a good start. For a sustainable future of work, I believe that the leisure time should exceed the work time, without eliminating it entirely. Good thing is that we can work and enjoy ourselves at the same time.
What do you think the ideal work and leisure balance?
Reference
President Online, https://president.jp/articles/-/88930
Michael Cholbi 2022, Philosophical Approaches to Work and Labor, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/work-labor/
Tachibana, Rei . 2017. Full-time housewives lose 200 million yen. Magazine House .
World Population Review, Average Workweek by Country 2024, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-work-week-by-country
JILPT 2023, https://www.jil.go.jp/kokunai/statistics/databook/2023/06/d2023_6T-02.pdf
Nihon Keizai Shinbun 2024, https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUC203OG0Q4A620C2000000/#:~:text=%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E3%81%AE%E6%9C%89%E4%BC%91%E5%8F%96%E5%BE%97%E6%97%A5%E6%95%B0,%E6%97%A5%EF%BC%89%E3%82%92%E8%B6%85%E3%81%88%E3%81%A6%E3%81%84%E3%81%9F%E3%80%82
