My old job required me to be at work (including breaks) about 25.5 hours one week, and 34 hours the next. My current full time job requires me to be there 45 hours a week. Even that jump has been dramatic for me in regards to my free time. I had no idea how much an extra 10-20 hours a week would mean for my free time.
I couldn’t imagine making another jump to 60 hours a week. My understanding is those jobs also require weekends as well as nights. No thanks.
Don’t come and live in Japan, then. 
My husband currently works about 35 minutes from home. He leaves the house at 6:15 and gets home on average about 9pm. If it goes much later than 10pm he will call me and tell me he’ll sleep at the office. They all have cots and sleeping bags for the purpose. If he gets home at 8 its a cause for celebration. In his current position, most weekends (say three out of four) he does get off. He officially gets 20 days of annual leave but usually can only take a week or so of that.
His job has short hours and is “unpressured” compared to a lot of my friends husbands, who leave the house later in the morning (7 or 8 ish) but regularly don’t get home till 1 or 2 am and who don’t have more than a couple of days a month off.
I guess medicine is a “lifestyle career” then. My mind is fairly boggling at the idea that some people work <40 hrs/week. I am about to begin residency, where I will work probably 60 hrs/week average. This is considerably less than people had to work even 10 years ago. The pay is 45-50K/yr, with good benefits and one month off. Surgeons will work probably closer to 80 hrs/week in residency.
This training is between 3-6 years, depending on specialty, and frankly I don’t mind it at all, because it is my only opportunity to manage patients fully supervised. Once done with residency, most attendings still work at least 50-60 hrs/week, i would say, unless they are in a particularly cushy specialty.
Almost every physician I know, though, is married and has kids. Some have stay-at-home spouses, but that number is decreasing. I have no idea how they make it work, other than the fact that they don’t seem to sleep much (myself excepted). I personally have no plans for kids, as I am exhausted every day when I get home and cannot imagine not being able to sleep in on the weekends.
I will say that 20 or so years ago, maybe even as recently as 15 years ago, in the deep South where I live, doctors
I’d say around 50 hours per week. I mean, you can do about 9-10 hours a day, pitiful lunch at your desk, and be on your game. Then spend at least a couple of hours on the weekend. But that’s about the maximum if you want to spend any time with your family.
I’ve got 3 kids, who are now starting to have a lot more weekend activities. I’ve also got a child on the autism spectrum with sleep issues that I deal with, unless I’m on a 5 day business trip to Asia.
more that around 50 hours per week just isn’t sustainable for me at least.
Question for the Japanese people. Is the “salaryman” work yourself to death culture typical of all Japanese companies or certain industries? In the US it tends to be specific to certain industries or types of jobs.
My husband goes to work at 8 am and is rarely home before 8 pm. He also works an average of 5 hours a day on weekends. He is the father of 4 kids and also has friends and hobbies. HOWEVER, it is a constant stress on our marriage and family life. And he can only do this because I work a part-time, flexible job, and when the kids were younger and needed more supervision I was a stay-at-home-mom.
It’s crazy, but possible under certain circumstances.
See, here’s the thing: When we had our baby, I made an agreement with my wife that I would handle some of the parenting responsibilities, and if that means that I can’t have a job in a startup enivironment, or a “high performance company”, then so be it. Family comes first. I still make a very good living as a software engineer.
I imagine Japanese husbands never handle the evening childcare responsibilities, yes? Such as feeding them dinner and putting them to bed.
I don’t think I would want to do more than 50 hour weeks. Life is so freakin short. Why do I want to spend all of it at work?
I don’t work at a lifesaving job or some place that NEEDS me there at all times. I’m reading about these Japanese men and it just makes me sad. Every little milestone in their child’s lives has been missed. And the kids grow up so fast…work will always be there.
I agree with you completely. As I approach 40, work has less and less appeal to me. I am lucky enough to work in something that I like fairly well and sometimes people’s lives depend on me but I don’t see the point of sacrificing my own life and especially my role in my kid’s life over work.
I work first and foremost as a paid whore just like the vast majority of people do. I do not distinguish between jobs much at all in that regard whether it is counter help at McDonald’s or CEO of a startup. It is strictly for money and benefits because that is what the real goal of every business and therefore each employee is. I will give it my best and work hard at whatever I say I will but there is nothing more to it than that.
I have been blindsided by layoffs and hit other circumstances beyond my control to know that you can’t ever be blindly loyal to a company or even a whole job category. The people who are career obsessed, especially the corporate ladder climbers, are insane to me.
What are they doing it for? You can make lots of money but you hardly but you lose freedom, true friends, and family time. If you kill yourself working and do your job well enough in the corporate world, it is just like a pie eating contest where first prize is all the pie you can eat. I don’t understand the appeal.
Pretty much everyone. Every office job I’ve ever heard about from friends or acquaintances has a 10–12 hour work day, and they’ve had to work some Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. Scheduling a group event like Hanami (cherry blossom viewing) usually means checking to see how many people have to work that particular Sunday. There’s always at least one or two in a group of 10–15 people. Last year, we had to push “Hanami” back to about 2 weeks after most of the flowers were gone because most of our friends, in various office jobs, couldn’t make it on any of the 2–3 weeks when they were actually blooming.
Part-time workers are less likely to work overtime, partially because the legal protections on hourly paid labor are slightly better. Most companies know they’d get fined for the kind of shenanigans they pull with their salaried workers. Everyone turns a blind eye to the unpaid overtime full employees have to serve, though.
There was a recent Japan Times article on working women in Japan that was notable for the perfect picture of shocked incomprehension on the face of International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde at hearing that most people arrive home from work at 11 p.m.
I’m reminded of my dad. When he was about 60 he got a new job working for an engineering construction company. They worked on large-scale construction projects such as factories, transit systems, airports, that kind of thing.
On his first day of work, they gave him a pager. That evening, he took the pager out of his pocket, turned it off, and put it in his nightstand. He never looked at it again. “I’m not a doctor, nobody’s life depends on my answering a call in the middle of the night,”, he told me. “Anything they need can wait till I’m in the office.”
He had that job until he retired, which he did on a day of his own choosing.
I’m not denying it happens (I’ve never been to Japan) but this says the Japanese only work about 1700 hours a year. A 60 hour workweek would be a 3000 hour year. I have no idea what % of Japanese workers are salaried. I know in the US it is common to abuse salaried workers too (esp in finance or management, at least from what I’ve seen).
The official numbers are fucking lies. And that’s the nice way of saying that. Many offices explicitly tell you to clock out…and then continue working. There is an enormous amount of time that is not officially logged, but is most definitely being worked.
I actually work fewer hours than most of my friends, and my minimum work weeks are 46–50 hours. I know people who work hourly jobs too, and they work overtime all the time. No one ever goes home after 8 hours. Ever. Seriously, ask any Japanese person. Grab someone off the street who is from Japan and ask. I guarantee they’ll tell you the same thing.
Assuming a two parent family - what is the maximum workweek hours a couple can put in with kids at home?
Lets say you have a lifestyle job and work 70-80 hours a week - but your wife stays home. Does that work? Or if you work 40 hours and your partner works 50? I worked “full time” about 35 hours for most of my kids childhoods - my husband worked 50 for most of it. That worked well - but if I had a big project and was being pushed beyond 45 hours for myself, our lives fell apart unless he could cut his hours - we just ran out of time for taking the kids to the doctor or dropping off forgotten backpacks and permission slips.
At 50+ hours for him and a consistent 40+ for me, we needed a nanny that we never had. We did have grandma, which helped.
I wouldn’t want a husband who works 70 hours a week while I stay at home, but I think that can be a successful arrangement if both parties are up for it.
I’ve heard the exact same thing from Japanese students of mine.
Seemsappropriate:
I can tell you I was not satisfied at all. I say “was” because at 12 and 16 my kids are now equal partners in the household when it comes to work and help so it’s not so crucial any more. I also have friends and some family (though they are now at an age when it’s more that they need us…) but when the kids were little it was me and me alone. There is also a delightful tenkin system which moves people every three to eight years, further ensuring isolation and no help.
So, childhood pneumonia and asthma attacks? Apart from the first time, on my own. When my baby had emergency surgery? On my own? A three month hospitalization with placenta previa? Mostly on my own but MIL did come down to look after my elder son. She left the day I got out of hospital and my husband was sent away for work for three weeks on the same day. Appendicitis? Oh yes, on my own. And with the threat of having to have the kids taken into care if it burst before he was allowed home. The hospital delayed the surgery for three days so I could stay with the kids until MIL could get there. Influenza more times than I can count? On my own. Along with every other kid thing you can think of. My work? Conferences? Trips away? Fun nights out with friends? All planned and 98% cancelled when he couldn’t get home despite promises that he would.
Am I bitter? HELL YEAH. But after maybe two years of nightly fights when he’d drag home exhausted and incapable of anything except having a bath and going to sleep (if I was there to wake him up when he fell asleep in it, so he wouldn’t drown…) he begged me to stop yelling when he got home, because we had the choice of making those few hours pleasant, or not. But the hours could not change. And I love him, and it’s not his fault. So I mostly shut up. Mostly.
Again, I don’t live there so I’m not denying it. I was wondering if either
A) the stats about a 1700 hour workyear are fudged by things doing like you say, asking people to work off the clock (I heard this is a problem in south Korea too)
B) just isolated to office jobs while many other jobs like manufacturing or retail follow normal hours. Is this a problem across all sectors in Japan or just office work?
After reading this thread I have a newfound sense of happiness with my career as a corporate, cubicle-dwelling drone. I work about a 8-9 hour day most of the time, and once in a while when a big project is going on it will be more, but not substantially, and infrequently. Travel amount is minor. What is more important to me is being able to do things with my kids and sustain my own personal projects and interests. I get paid enough with benefits to allow the spouse to stay at home with a part-time job. It has not always been easy, but I recognize the lifestyle I have, and that we live as a family, is pretty good in comparison to what it could be, and I want to keep it that way for now.
Of course, the sacrifice is to my career. Sure, I could be working on a lot of high-powered projects, or consulting, and make more money and have more influence, but that would probably necessitate additional hours that would cut into the family and “me” time. So to me, it is not worth it. To others, it is. Each to his own.