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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Japanese workers are offered an average of twenty days off each year and take only twelve, leaving eight unused vacation days lying on the table.

No lie, that's a qualified success: it used to be 14 days offered and 8 exercised in Japan, as recently as a few years ago. (The 2006ish timeframe? Read it in a work-related report. [+])

[+] Proving once again that you can almost never underestimate how bad the Japanese work culture is, the actual stats from 平成19年就労条件総合調査結果の概況 (covering 2006) were, at companies above 1,000 employees, 9.7 days offered and 5 actually used. You might think "Well maybe that's the megacorps being shoddy" but the actual numbers get worse as you go down the size-of-employer table.

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At my company in Japan, we had 20 public holidays though. That's a lot more than we get in the US.

But those public holidays come at a cost -- trying to do any sort of activity during Golden Week is next to impossible because of overcrowding.

That just sounds outright stressful. That sounds like Black Friday shopping in the USA, something I avoid like the plague every year.

It's not nearly as bad as Black Friday (except the roads and Shinkansen in really popular routes). Hotels are full but hotels are full other times of the year too. The logistics end up working out

Do they have any way to figure in the part where salarymen often work Saturdays?

If you add in the shorter weekends, I'm not sure if you even get to the equivalent of zero days off.

That's just scary. It definitely shows how much culture can change/warp our ideas about existence. Although that few days off probably is a significant factor in heightened Japanese suicide rates.

I am not sure the days off to hours per week ratio for a sane life..

I.e. I hear 12 days off and I shrug. I hear 18 hour workdays and never seeing your family and my jaw drops.

I think if I worked 20h weeks, 0 days off would be okay. You never get THAT burned out over a week that the weekend can't cure you.

But if I worked 80 hour weeks, I would need 30 days off per year to stay long term sane.

Of course, that makes perfect sense. It is the number of days off being so low combined with things like this: http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/09/news/japan-work-salaryman/ that make me truly concerned. The combination of hours and lack of days off surely takes a toll on mental health and productivity.

I'd rather have shorter weeks and zero days off, but that just might be my personality. I hate the idea that once in a while I'll get a vacation that I'll enjoy half of and spend the last half dreading going back.

Sounds like you need a new job? I can honestly say that I'm usually excited and energised after a holiday and ready to get back to work. Sure there is part of me that would like to stay on a beach or with my family for ever, but equally there is a large part of me that enjoys solving the problems I solve at work and the people I work with.

I definitely felt that dread in the past though, but don't think that is how it has to be. There are great roles out there!

Mind blowing (but not surprising) is how low Japan (and South Korea) ranks in terms of worker productivity. IIR, if South Koreans worked at a similar productivity as Norwegians, they could take half the week off with no effects at all on GDP. Japan is only slightly better.

In other words, quite a bit of those long work hours are absolutely useless.

Norway is perhaps not the best country for comparison. If South Koreans could get 22% of their GDP and 67% of their exports from the Oil & Gas sector that would help their productivity too.

http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/count...

This is overly-simplistic, and misses three key points:

1) Labour productivity is measured as the _average_ output per worker, i.e. total output divided by total number of workers. It does not measure the _marginal_ output of an additional worker (i.e. the derivative of output with respect to number of workers).

2) Labour is not the only factor of production. There is also land, financial capital, technology, etc.

3) Haircuts in Norway cost more than haircuts in South Korea. Is a South Korean barber less productive than a Norwegian one?

So if I understand correctly we should compare:

1. Median household income (which should mostly be wages and not land, financial capital, technology).

2. Divided by purchasing power parity (to normalize for different prices in the country).

3. Divided by average hours worked per week for households with median income.

This is however assuming that if an employee gets paid X (in purchasing power parity) for their work, then their generated value is some linear constant of X. I don't know how to compensate for the scenario where this is false.

None of that would account for a massive national surplus of a globally demanded resource (oil in Norway's case). A strong currency based on heavy exports of energy can subsidize all of the other factors.

All you have to do is estimate the impact to GDP that has on Norway, and pull it out from the comparison.

Norways Currency NOK isnt strong, its actually one of the weaker currencies:

Here it is in the last 2 years falling compared to USD and EUR.

http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=NOK&to=USD&view=2Y http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=NOK&to=EUR&view=2Y

Norway is oil exporter. Oil is cheap now -> NOK is falling.

No, that wouldn't work, due to the effects of my point 2 above. Google 'solow growth model' to get some idea about why.

Yeah but this is easy to manage and predict. You tell everyone to do X work, where X is somewhere in the bottom quartile of productivity. If someone does less, you tell them to pick it up - it's pretty likely they're slacking off too much as opposed to being unable to perform. But you don't want people to do more, because then you start having different employees. Some would get jealous at others' higher productivity and more free time and you'll have to manage people differently and give different salaries and it will all be MADNESS. It's easiest for management if everyone is the same somewhat inefficient cog in the machine.

I have a friend working in Japan who tells me his coworkers spend a lot of time just sleeping at work. It doesn't seem to be frowned upon. Apparently they are extremely inefficient, doing long hours, sleeping little and suffering from it during the day at work.

I wonder. Japan also has 16 national holidays in comparison with (for example) the US's 11.

The importance of that really depends on who observes holidays. There is no legal incentive for US employers to observe any. I don't know where your eleven come from, but that sounds like the Federal Government's number for its employees. Private employers typically observe 4-8, including Christmas.

Can confirm, get seven holidays.

On the bright side, I'm a shift worker, so I get to take holidays whenever I want, no questions asked. It's bundled in with my PTO, except it doesn't roll over if I don't use it. As a result, your first seven days of PTO are "holidays."

Another peculiar aspect is that Japan is the country with the most bank holidays in the world, so if you're in the lucky half of the population that has the "salaryman" qualification (mon-fri) then you get almost a week in January , almost a week in May,and a dozen or so guaranteed 3 day weekends (including this one)

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