Wake up at 7:30, commute to
work, spend 13 hours in the office, run for the last train home, eat, and crash
into to bed. The next day, rinse and repeat. Welcome to the insane working
hours of a Japanese "salaryman" during crunch times at work. It's a
schedule that sometimes leads to what the Japanese call karoshi—death by
overwork. Now, in an attempt to help, the Japanese government is considering a
plan to force workers to take five vacation days a year.
Here's an expat in Japan
documenting his typical work week, with 78 hours of work and only 35 hours of
sleep:
Now the Japanese government is
considering stepping in to stop the madness, with plans to submit legislation
that would make five days of paid vacation mandatory every year.
"People are literally
working themselves to death," says Jeffrey Johnson, a researcher at the
University of Maryland who studied the phenomenon of karoshi. "There's an
accumulation of case studies of people who worked extremely intense hours, and
then died when they were relatively young." A Japanese nonprofit set up by
the families left behind lists one typical example: Mr. Kanameda, who worked as
many as 110 hours every week at a snack food company, and died at 34.
Like the U.S., where only half
of workers took a single vacation day last year, Japan has a culture that makes
people reluctant to take time off. "People truly believe the harder they
work, the better they are," says Johnson. "And there's this kind of
samurai commitment to their employers, this devotion to duty that enables
people to lose that almost instinctual self-protection."
The problem isn't just long
hours, but the intensity of work. Some jobs also incorporate the philosophy of
kaizen—continuous improvement—which asks employees to ruthlessly eliminate any
second of downtime on the job.
Reference: fastcoexist
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