The Japanese art of not sleeping
bbc.com
bbc.com
Work goes on from 8am - 9pm, after which many are expected to go out and socialize with their colleagues (karaoke etc) and get drunk until 3am. Rinse and repeat, most days of the week. It wasn't at all unusual to see rows of salarymen asleep on the subway every morning.
Japan's most popular drink is a brand of canned coffee which is on sale everywhere and in the vending machines that line the streets. Coca Cola's brand of this coffee accounts for an outsize proportion of their global profits (something like 12%, only sold in Japan).
All of this seems to be totally okay and accepted despite the obvious impact on productivity of regularly going for long periods without sleep. This is the offices of Dentsu, Japan's largest media agency, at night: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX6--sQtsA
Yet another strange Japan-related fact. That is an insane amount of coffee.
For anyone curious, the Coca Cola beverage is called "Georgia": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_(coffee).
It's all full of sugar though, more like slightly coffee flavoured milkshakes. Combination of the sugar and caffeine really works though...
Is it socially acceptable not to do so? Or is there high pressure from peers or superiors to do it?
When do people spend time with their families there? If they even have families...
You would probably be expected to participate in the larger one, whereas particpating in less of the smaller ones would become adverse career wise over time. Drinking is theoretically optional.
Typically family time seemed to be at weekends, and heavily focused on getting out and about into the countryside etc. The apartments are so small that it wouldn't really be feasible or desirable to hang out at home much.
I mean, they work all this time, which seems like twice what an average country would do, and they're still doing ho-hum in most markets, are non-existent in most areas of modern tech, and have a huge deficit.
If it weren't for their cars and some consumer electronics stuff (that has seen its peak in the late 80s - early 90s) they'd be done.
He said in Japan expectation #1 is you're at work for many hours. You show up before your boss arrives and you go home after he leaves, unless you're out drinking with him. Which is mostly mandatory - "My wife is sick" is an acceptable excuse. "I'm tired" is not. In the big companies the people from your college class at that company all get promoted as a group, so there's a whole lot of pressure from your college friends not to do (or not do) anything that will delay their own advancement.
But when you're at work you're not expected to look for things to do. Your boss will tell you when he needs you to do something. If he doesn't come by and give you a task it's perfectly reasonable to sit at your desk and do nothing. As an employer or manager you are not supposed to run your people ragged, either. My friend spent most of every morning going around to each employee and making sure they had something to do, but not so much it would reflect badly on him as an employer.
In the end he figured Americans and Japanese people get about the same amount of work done every day. The social dynamics are totally different, though. In Japan your work is like a second family.
There's also a sort of macho culture there, where as a salaryman you work incredibly long hours and deal with crazy commutes without complaining. And if you do complain you sort of lose social points.
The creative output isn't great either. Agencies like Dentsu are the size they are because of relationships, and that there will be someone there to answer the phone any time of the day or night, rather than out of any creative brilliance.
Dentsu are an example of a big Japanese company that has recently started to work with Western companies to in effect, outsource the innovation and creative ideas bit.
Your analysis is correct - once Japan lost its supply chain supremacy they were never likely to be able to win back the advantage by producing higher quality goods and services.
Would you say the Chinese are somewhat different in this regard?
I have a feeling they can have more knack for this going forward.
> http://www.strategyand.pwc.com/media/file/Shan_Zhai_AChinese...
Innovation is easy when iterating, but such organisational culture has little push for true 'innovation'. 'Shanzhai' as a term was considered fun 5 years ago, but today is taken as an insult when such companies are CMMI5 approved. 'Innovation' is a new buzz word adopted in China over the past 2 years replacing shanzhai.
The very very open culture also results in very very quick quick releases of employees that don't maintain sufficient updates and success stories to company owners, roughly on a 2-week basis, and major breakthrough every quarter. That's not a culture for innovation, but iterating someone else's idea.
PS: Don't forget GDP is a somewhat meaningless number in peacetime, it's per capita GDP that people notice. Their real issue is an unstistanable public debt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YKK_Group
Definitely not making cars nor consumer electronics.
In some cases the family relationships have a strict division of labor: Dad works and Mom raises the family. Two very distinct lives. In more traditional companies and families it can look bad to come home from work by 6. (Are you no longer important?) In other cases the forced socializing eases up somewhat over the years, or the parents find work in smaller or foreign companies.
May be worth a look.
Coffee makes the world go around.
The photos you see of people sleeping on the stairs, etc are probably late-night drunks, not inemuri
The phenomenon described is real, but people do it more slumped over on the train, meetings, etc. not sprawled out on the sidewalk.
Furthermore, it extends beyond salarymen on trains; my wife & teenage daughter both do it simply as a way of life almost. They could go to bed at a decent hour but usually stay up late & catnap instead.
My wife (as a Japanese salarywoman) is perpetually tired, but still stays up late watching TV/SNS. Why? "If I went to bed early, my whole life would just be work and sleep"
Sleeping in public, sleeping on a train, napping whenever?
The fact of time management that puts you into position that require such naps?
Or something else?
The article implies, but it's not clear for me on what.
Personally, what most shocked me is how accepted and common this is.
To the point that when I friend came to study to Spain she asked me: "Why is no one sleeping in the library?"
On the other side, I believe it's also dangerous. I visited Malaysia with my gf, and she would fall asleep in every train and taxi because it's just what they do.
I also commonly see people taking naps during lunchtime in Starbucks. Someone will come in, grab a coffee, take a nap for 30 min, drink the coffee and go back to work. There's nothing wrong with that! (other than I want the table :P)
Unfortunately the corporate culture is not where it should be. There are some companies that want to be like western startups where taking a nap on the office sofa wouldn't raise an eyebrow but those are very rare. In most Japanese companies it would be totally unacceptable to sleep in the office.
They're cultures that you can see "see people at McDonalds early in the morning after a night out" all the time, without having to go there directly from working late...
It is great that you can safely take a nap in a public space without fear of being robbed or worse (as one would have to fear outside Japan), without having police called on you, and with general public acceptance of such action.
Nobody will think you're a bum or a mad or look at you funny. Try that somewhere else and let's see what happens!
Japanese corporate culture is terrible and that is sad. I don't have an answer to that.
Broken according to which cultural paradigms? Just because we have different ideas in the west does not make them better.
In all the coffeeshops in Austin, Texas at least, I've seen baristas wake up customers who are napping. But I understand why they do that: there are many homeless people around and if anyone could just take naps...
In Western terms, I would say it's "bad" from a happiness/relaxation perspective. Not really from the lack of sleep; while I wouldn't say I go as far as the Japanese, I do tend to sleep less than most people... just that all the social machinations around it: e.g. "succumbing" to sleep as a measure of looking virtuous/like a hard worker in front of your peers, for example. I find things like that exhausting and the need to do that would significantly decrease my level of happiness.
But that's just it: happiness is subjective. What makes me happy or unhappy need not be even remotely related to what makes someone else the same. As much as I may think it's weird or undesirable, all that really matters is that the people who live like that are happy with their lives. It's only a problem if they're not.
Yes, but usually we assume that you stop doing that for your health's sake after you finish school.
I often see people napping in all of the above, both here in Russia, around Eastern Europe and in South America. And it's no big deal most of the times.
And things like sleeping on the bus/train or sitting on a bench seem to be normal all over the world.
The catch is, i never been to either Japan or USA, so i can't set the zero properly.
Of course you do see it on public transit in the early and late hours at times, and it's not a big deal, but its definitely not 'normal'. Napping at work is especially frowned upon, with perhaps the exception of someone going out to the park during lunch time.
The general feeling/culture (not necessarily my personal opinion) is that you should have had enough sleep the night before so that you can be productive for the day's work. If you've stayed up so late (partying or whatever) the night before such that you need rest during the day, you're short-changing your employer and teammates. A nap might be the right thing to do to restore your energy, but you should not have put yourself in that position to start with.
Of course these days I don't need to stay up half the night to feel like I need a nap in the afternoon... :)
[edit] After reading the article, I see that the Japanese culture connects the tiredness with working hard/late, which changes the perception. I think in the US and Canadian culture this can happen in some extreme cases - we've all heard (or lived) stories of people working like crazy to meet project deadlines, and sleeping in the office, etc. And road-warriors fighting jet lag are often given some credit for that tired/haggard look. Blue collar workers are more prone to given respect for being particularly tired at the end of the day, but napping or dozing off is still not really rewarded/honored like it seems to be in Japan, because of the quite different work-time expectations.
The real shock for me was when I went back to Canada and realized I'd picked up the habit inadvertently! I would naturally fall asleep in some boring classes and had a lot of difficulty stopping that. Generally the prof would notice and call me out to everyone's amusement, or a neighbor would give me a nudge. It really did not feel acceptable to sleep in class as in Japan.
Honestly, it never really occurred to me that people sleep in public in other parts of the world.
My work day is from 7:40 to 16:20 so that I can spend time with my kids.
It was 10pm on a weeknight.
That said, what might contribute to the cleanliness in the photo though is that it was possibly taken after the last train (all trains stop after around midnight), so it's not unlikely the stairs are exceptionally clean because they had just been cleaned before.
On a slightly unrelated note regarding having to be vacuumed constantly, the stairs being clean and the extremely low rate of unemployment in japan might not be unrelated, and on topic it might also not be unrelated to the prevalence of sleeping in situations that would be utterly unacceptable in other countries, such as meetings :)
I used to think Toronto was a clean city. After visiting Tokyo, I see that very few areas in Toronto are actually clean.
However
There's one class of people who believe that it's their God given right to litter wherever and whenever they want, and that's smokers.
You can especially see it around Tram stops where people are waiting around and will quite happily throw their cigarette butts on the ground or pavement when the tram approaches.
Usually between 5 and 6am, that helps keep them clean, too.
(I’m a German who usually wakes up from the sound in the morning)
Anyway, napping is something most cultures appreciate. Just seems we don't accommodate it as well as the Japanese.
In a corporate environment, this is not much different than it is in America. Also, if you own a small business, you never have to participate in corporate tribalism. I've met plenty of people who own internet cafes, fried chicken deliveries, anime stores, etc. who slept reasonable hours.