早稲田大学法学部　英語Theme

2016年度秋学期　授業用ページ

担当　鈴木順子


Working style in Japan

Overdoing it

A new report shows how badly Japan needs labour reform



LATE of an evening, Japan’s black-suited salarymen let their hair down in the streets of Shimbashi, a district of Tokyo. Shirts untucked, ties off, liquor flowing, they stagger around before heading home, or directly back to the office via a konbini (convenience store) to buy a clean shirt.

This is the harmless outlet for their stress: karoshi, or death by overwork, is the darker, and until recently, more overlooked one. This month the first ever government report into the scale of karoshi found that employees put in over 80 hours of overtime a month at almost a quarter of companies surveyed. At 12% of those firms the figure rose to a whopping 100 hours. These numbers may underestimate the problem; under a fifth of 10,000 companies contacted responded, which is a normal response rate, but firms with still worse overtime figures may have kept out of the study.

Little wonder that 93 people committed or attempted to commit suicide in the year to the end of March 2015 because of overwork. These are the cases where the government has officially recognised that families are owed compensation; activists against karoshi reckon the number is too low. Other workers perish from heart attacks or strokes due to long hours. The latest high-profile case is a 24-year-old female employee for Dentsu, a Japanese advertising giant, who committed suicide in December.

Things have got somewhat better in recent years; more overtime is paid, for example. But further steps are needed. Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, says that changing the working style in Japan is one of the main aims of labour reforms that he plans to introduce next year. Yuriko Koike, the new governor of Tokyo, wants to improve the city’s work-life balance and has banned workers in her office from staying past 8pm.

But it remains hard to overhaul business practices when the culture values face time and dedication to the job far ahead of performance. “The company is like a big team. If I leave work early, someone else has to shoulder my work and that makes me feel terribly guilty,” says a 42-year-old IT worker who preferred to remain anonymous. It does not help that the shrinking and ageing of Japan’s population means labour shortages. And all this overwork does little for the economy, because (thanks to the inefficient working culture as well as low use of technology) Japan is one of the least productive economies in the OECD, a club of rich nations, generating only $39 dollars of GDP per hour worked compared with America’s $62. So the fact that workers are burning out and sometimes dying is pointless as well as tragic.


The Economist Oct 15th 2016
Comments

TokyoAndy

in my office filling a time sheet was required but was common to under-report working hours: if you report all your hours, the time sheet would turn red, and that would look bad on me and my boss (i was called in a few times for this). Then again, if you leave at 7pm after 10 hrs in the office japanese colleagues would look at you and use remarks like 'oh, leaving already? lucky you' with a fake smile
-- banzai

Jurimi in reply to TokyoAndy

Yep, Japanese corporate culture sucks for everyone. I've been working in Japan on and off for 20 years and not a thing has improved. I work for a large Japanese company which is chronically overstaffed. Too many people, not enough to do but people still hang around to 8pm, 9pm. The vast majority of the retire-at-60 for-lifers are kept on for their 'loyalty' but are taught nothing new so the gaps are filled by an ever-increasing pool of mid-career hires or consultants from the Big 4 who charge exhorbitant fees. When it comes time for restucturing, the shorter-time-served skilled ones are let go rather than the underskilled-but-loyal ones. And indeed, loyalty comes from the fact that they are kept underskilled - nowhere else would hire them.

Quite possibly the worst way to run a company.

Canuck Truck

Indentured labour. It was a feudal practice. I love traditions but this is a form of "modern slavery". Shame!

CA-Oxonian

Japanese society is collapsing upon itself in slow motion. As Japanese culture appears incapable of change, we should expect some very interesting phenomena to become increasingly extreme as the process accelerates towards its ultimate conclusion.
This is very, very sad for Japanese people but will provide a fascinating case study for everyone else.

guest-ajammnjs

Japan did "financial reform" in the late 80's after signing The Plaza Accord.

All it got was a bubble, a collapse, and a Lost Decade.

Japan need Trump to win in November.

Then Trump will lead the US to returning to when "America was Great."

A recovery in Japan will occur as they once again make and export turntables, speakers, cassette decks, TVs....

NSFTL
Regard

non-juror

Poor article. Why no explanation of Japan's "inefficient working culture as well as low use of technology"?

Because it is not the focus of the article, and hence it does not matter?

The way I read the article, the author suspects, in my opinion rightfully, that even when Japanese labour productivity would be higher the problem of overworking would still endure. It is more of a cultural thing, and does not come from a 'dying need to deliver more labour/products'.
Hence, the low productivity is not a cause for the overworking. Instead the author (inexplicably) suggests that it (the low productivity) might even be a result of the overworking; people work long hours, can't focus and as a result their productivity decreases (which is defined as the average productivity per hour, not the total labour delivered during a day).

H. Matt

I work at a middle-sized Japanese company. On average, people work 11 hours, but persons who do scheduling for operators may work even 14-15 hours a day. After working such hours ten years, some people burn out.

guest-naomwio

Would like to see why Japan has such an 'inefficient working culture' and 'low use of technology' at work. Some reforms are obviously needed as it looks like they're going nowhere

AlecFahrin

Although this not an argument to do nothing, the damage really has already been done.

Etrigan

"Japan is one of the least productive economies in the OECD"

This should surprise nobody. Anyone with real-world knowledge knows that company cultures that value face time over productivity are incredibly inefficient places to work.

The fact is, biologically, the human brain can only function at peak performance for a few hours a day. I'm a CPA with two masters degrees a highly complex, technical job. I'm pretty smart and sued to brain-intensive work. Yet after 3-4 hours of intense concentration I start feeling brain fatigue.

The dirty open secret is that employees who spend late hours in the office because they're afraid to be the first person to leave are not working. They're on Facebook, staring blankly at their laptops, pretending to work, or due to brain fatigue, taking two hours to do tasks that could be done in 20 minutes with a fresh brain.

Long hours don't only result in low productivity, they result in demotivation, stress, personal and family problems and just general societal evil. The productivity numbers consistently show that countries with shorter working hours are more productive. So if both the human and economic data show no justification for this kind of culture, why do governments allow it to persist?

Time to learn from Europe. The solution is simple: make it a crime for any company to make any employee work more than 8 hours a day. Paying overtime is not the answer- banning long hours is. That also means banning after-work phone calls and emails.

Obviously there won't be any economic consequences- inf act, the resultant higher productivity might boost the economy. Happier workers are more productive workers. it's time for public policy makers, economists and legislators (in Japan and elsewhere) to see long working hours for what they are- a form of market failure that needs to be curbed with strict regulation.

guest-ajamijon

All countries are contradictory in their own ways and Japan is no exception. But in countries whereby "saving face" is not a cultural stigma or shame, change is easier. The role of the trade union must be kept active- constantly!

bampbs

Well, long hours and utter exhaustion does keep Japanese minds off of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Kremilek2

It is then not so much surprising that Japan is on the course to die out when people spend too much time in work instead of with their families. I wonder that there is no force to change this destructive culture. Aren't there any reasonale unions?

It's all the older generation as well, they loathe going home early to their wives and families so early in the day so stay around at the office for no reason. In the bubble days they could go drinking but recreation expense accounts have dried up these days..

Furthermore, seeing as everyone expects to stay at the office late into the night, they don't do any work during the day either

canabana

I admire the Japanese diligence with work, but sometimes they take it too seriously and unnecessary.

Few years ago when I was in Sapporo Hokkaido for a couple days. I went to the bank to exchange a couple hundred US dollars to yen.
The lady clerk checked out the two hundred dollar bills and my passport, then placed the money and filled out paper forms in a small basket, passed to her supervisor to double check, he then placed the basket at the money exchange window behind a few other baskets waiting to be processed. After a short while, the basket came back to the clerk through the supervisor. She then counted the yens in front of me, twice... with a smile.

I kind of wondered about the efficiency of the whole process for couple hundred dollars....
Too much work and time consuming.

Avantel

I have long witnessed the terrible Japanese productivity as a fan of their entertainment. Their production volumes are industrial levels and even anime & manga itself shows how terrible overworked their creators are, as well as underpaid. "Bunny Drop" is an example.

However the vast majority of all this hard work never gets property rights abroad. Their music is basically isolated. Any body heard of Hatsune Miku here? That's their top vocaloid (anime) singer. Their marketing and legal department may well spend their lives at work but as far as results go there's hardly any.

It looks only the USA gets many titles being sold legally, the vast majority of those works being pornography or just plain commercial junk products (Naruto, Pokemon, etc) for the ignorant masses. Their marketing staff are ignoring wide audiences and markets, which the anime excels at: aiming at all sorts of audiences, unlike the American entertainment, which only cares for the juvenile males.

It looks like many Japanese do work to death, but many others only fool around, play politics or else other than real work.

Avantel

If any Japanese is out there reading this article, please stop for a moment to learn that the European nations get their work done with far shorter working times, much less than half in most of Western Europe. Yet, the quality of their work is not lower at all but the opposite. European goods are normally coveted worldwide, luxury symbols.

I hope Japanese don't claim they have less resources than Europeans. Japan has plenty of technology and is still a developed nation. Moreover, many West European nations are not that rich, the Mediterranean area.
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