Japanese has a word, Karoshi, for overworking to death
A survey by the Japanese ministry of health, labour and welfare said that 30-40% of men can’t sleep due to work stress and that 40% of men and women sleep less than six hours a day
Working 12 or even 14 hours is considered “honourable” and as a good thing
This kind of dystopian hellhole is not a country like North Korea, where people are forced to work by a one party system, it is in a parliamentary democratic and highly developed country of Japan.
The 8 hour workday for all professions was adopted by the Soviet Union more than a hundred years ago and the very first 8 hour workday was implemented by Spain in the 16th century. Yet now in the 21st century there are people in developed countries that are free and still decide to spend their life by stressing for 12 or 14 hours a day, from morning till night, some even on weekends.
It’s cool and fancy to be a foreign freelancer living in Japan for a year while working from a laptop, but being an actual Japanese person that is thought strict discipline since school and is bullied by social norms into working for 12 to 14 hours, sleeping for less than 6 hours,etc?
One of the most depressing things I’ve ever seen is Japanese salarymen riding to or from work on the trains in Tokyo. The people in the streets, shops, and eateries during the day look happy enough, but the male office workers during commuting hours mostly look clinically depressed or (a few hours later) visibly intoxicated. That was my observation as a tourist, at least.
The Economist has an index that they now call the “Where-to-be-born” index, aggregating various factors that reflect quality of life. This seems to be a better measure of what you are considering than the numerous indexes that are oriented toward assessing emigration destinations.
Japan is mid-table among developed nations, neither strikingly good nor bad. Around the same position as the U.K., a little below the U.S.
Something else I just checked that surprised me. It’s “common knowledge” that Japan has a troubling suicide rate, right? In fact - it’s on the high end, but it’s similar to the U.S., and certainly not an outlier among OECD countries.
The easiest way to answer this seems to be to go throught all the appropriate indices (HDI, happiness, infant mortality, average work hours, corruption, inequalities etc), take from those a list of what you define as “developed countries” and compare Japan to them.
There is also the question of climate, weather, existance and frequency of natural disasters (and the robustness of the response to them) and the differences between the experiences of the immigrant, non-immigrant and minority populations.
There are a lot more opportunities to follow non-standard roads to a career than there used to be, including a lot of kinds of artisan work that require years to master but that can be very satisfying (if you like that sort of thing). There are a lot of smaller companies to work for too, where there is much more of a family feeling. In the corporate world, compensation for younger workers often includes heavy subsidies for housing, food and commute costs.
If you look on YouTube you can find at least one series about “day in the life” of various jobs and professions. The host is annoying, but the picture of working life in Japan does not look horrible. There is another series called “life where I’m from” which talks a lot about living conditions (not especially about work) and what it takes to live comfortably in Japan. I think anyone who is interested would find these videos useful (no affiliation).
In the US, 40% of adults report six or less hours of sleep a night as well. I read that and thought “Wait, there’s adults regularly sleeping MORE than six hours a night?”
With the risk of getting wooshed, I will take this opportunity to make PSA that official recommendations for adults is 7-9 hours of sleep per day. Thank you and good night.
raises hand I average about 7-8 hours (and I wake up at 6:30 a.m.) My wife seems to work all day, but I think she ekes out 6 most days, and catches up at some point. The idea of not getting six hours of sleep for more than a couple days at a time is simply foreign to me. I would not be productive at all.
To hopefully prevent a derail from “Does Japan suck?” to “How much snooze do you get a night?”, I was more making a tongue-in-cheek comment about <6 being the norm for me and that the US seems to pretty much match Japan’s metric on sleep-deprived adults. So, on that basis at least, it doesn’t seem Japan is any worse off than the US.
It is on the Ring of Fire.
Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, etc.
20% of the landmass is arable for farming.
Mountains, cliffs & bare rock is the rest.
No local petroleum sources.
Lack of sleep though can be a factor on why there are fewer kids being born in Japan as before.
Men who sleep five hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep seven hours or more.
(Laughter)
In addition, men who routinely sleep just four to five hours a night will have a level of testosterone which is that of someone 10 years their senior. So a lack of sleep will age a man by a decade in terms of that critical aspect of wellness. And we see equivalent impairments in female reproductive health caused by a lack of sleep.
This is the best news that I have for you today.
(Laughter)
From this point, it may only get worse. Not only will I tell you about the wonderfully good things that happen when you get sleep, but the alarmingly bad things that happen when you don’t get enough, both for your brain and for your body.
And yet 125 million people manage to prosper and thrive there.
I would say their biggest current issue is none of the ones you mentioned, but their low birth rate, combined with a fairly strong xenophobia. The influx if foreign nationals to fill the labor gap is going to permanently change the country, and possibly in a way that the locals won’t like.
I lived there for three years and you are completely out of the ballpark. Japan is one of the most astonishingly beautiful places on earth, the people are pretty awesome and I’d move to Shikoku in a shot–the aging population has left an incredible number of gorgeous properties up for grabs since most Japanese seem to want to gravitate toward large cities. Me, I’m a country mouse and would love to live back there again.
As for being on the Ring of Fire, so are Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California where all the same conditions obtain–and yet, I’ve lived the other 59 years of my life in those states and somehow have avoided violent death from a volcano or an earthquake or a tsunami. And I always have to laugh at people who freak out about earthquakes and volcanoes who live in freaking TORNADO ALLEY. I mean, volcanoes and earthquakes enough to really cause trouble happen every few hundred years but tornadoes are EVERY YEAR. Not to mention all the hurricanes the Left Coast doesn’t get. Human risk assessment is notably poor.
Japan seems alright to live in, not the best (pick a Nordic, any Nordic), but not the worst (that would be the USA, although the UK is rapidly approaching that level of terrible)
If this is the Japanology series, I must disagree, Peter Barakan is awesome.
No, it’s someone else completely (I also enjoy Japanology). The host I’m referring to is named Paolo, and he follows different people as they go about their workday. Perhaps I should modify my description to “somewhat annoying” as he’s not bad enough to ruin the videos and make them unwatchable.
I watch this series! Yes, it’s interesting to follow various types of workers around and see how they do their jobs. The most interesting ones are the ones who aren’t salarymen.
Paolo isn’t my favorite channel host, but he’s all right.
Agree 100%! The “dystopian hellhole” and “not a nice place” lines are completely inaccurate. I spent a month in Japan and while it’s not utopia, it’s a wonderful country where the quality of life is very good. Cities are clean and livable, people are polite and mostly happy, and beautiful lakes, mountains and coasts are within easy reach of the cities.
And the Ring of Fire location isn’t significantly more dangerous than other parts of the globe. Natural disasters happen everywhere.
