"sleep four hours pass, sleep five hours fail" - is/was that true in Japan? what are implications?

Factual Questions
1

I don’t wish to discuss issues of morality or social usefulness of the sort of academic regimen that could give rise to this saying. Instead, let’s discuss more practical issues:

  1. can people really sleep 28 hours a week and keep on doing intellectual type of work? I mean, those high school kids weren’t exactly digging ditches, they must have been passing math tests and writing essays and similar. Or how many hours did/do they actually sleep? Do they maybe sleep 4 hours on weekdays and 8 hours on weekends?

  2. have the Japanese parents really empirically determined that for the vast majority of their kids the loss of study time from extra sleep is not compensated by (presumable) higher level of intellectual functioning that comes from better sleep? Have there been contrarian, curious people who would experiment having their kid sleep 5 or 6 hours instead and see if maybe that makes him do better? Could it be that this alleged superior performance of 4 hour kids is just a fluke applicable to a small but high publicized minority who are capable of handling minimal sleep whereas all the other kids who are forced into such regimen suffer pointlessly?

  3. is there publicized or unpublicized widespread self-medication with stimulants by Japanese high school students to handle the high workload and lack of sleep?

2

I don’t know the answers to most of the question, but I’ll throw in my anecdotal $.02 on one of your questions:

Pretty much for my entire life I have never been able to sleep well. Not only do I have trouble getting to sleep, I sleep lightly and wake often. I probably average 4 hours of light sleep a night in a regular week, unless I take sleeping pills or drink heavily. For about a year I’ve been on an Ambien substitute, and that is probably getting me a blessed 6 hours of sleep these days. But for most of my life I wasn’t on anything…and I managed to function just fine on 4 hours of sleep for years. And I wasn’t digging ditches either. :slight_smile:

-XT

3

Well, it’s definitely an actual expression: 四当五落 or 4当5落 (yon tou go raku), literally “four pass, five fail.”

Let me share with you another Japanese expression:

出る釘は打たれる 。(Deru kugi wa utareru.) “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”