Tokyoites Don’t Get Enough Sleep

Again, it’s all about face and saving it. Any free time or holidays you have should be spent awake, and at the very least pretending to be busy. If you are bold enough to take a paid holiday or sick day, never tell your coworkers or peers that you just relaxed, slept in, had a good time. You will be branded lazy and a poor worker.

Burning the midnight oil once in a while is necessary sometimes, but I know a lot of people in Japan who really aren’t working so hard that they need to stay at work until 10pm every night. It’s just the stupid games of the boss/seniors/team members trying to prove what hard workers they are by staying at work the longest. God forbid they all knock off at a sensible hour, eat a good meal and get a good night’s sleep and become more efficient workers for it.

Even the junior high kids I teach only average 5-6 hours of sleep a night. There was an interesting article in the news recently about how the Japanese average height hasn’t grown in recent decades. It’s hardly surprising when you know the kids have a chronic lack of sleep and poor nutrition.

I have this argument with my, Japanese, wife all the time: duration of day at work has little to do with productivity, but duration of rest most certainly does. She takes that as well as my argument that we kicked her people’s @$$ because if we’d had our code broken and our tactics understood too, we wouldn’t have continued to keep using them.