Slacker Americans who insist on actually using the time the contract gives them might receive, say, 14 days off in an April to April fiscal year, in addition to public holidays (which are roughly as numerous as they are in the US, but not on the same days -- people work on Christmas and get off on the emperor's birthday, for example). While it is very much
not the normal practice, I have special permission from my bosses to be allowed to take the majority of my days off at Christmas so that I can travel home and see my family.
The contract also allows for sick days, bereavement days (1 day for a child/sibling/spouse, 2 days for a parent -- I'm just reporting), and days off for weddings and childbirth. These are, ahem, not utilized to their fullest extent. In practice, the only sick leave I have ever seen taken at my company involved a) a nervous breakdown and b) chemotherapy for metastatizing bone cancer. (He got better... and came back to work!) Our best engineer came in the day after his mother died (although my boss tried to send him home).
Unused leave of the first kind accumulates, which results in older employees in my company having literally months of it sitting around. They will likely never use it, and they'll lose it when they separate from the company. Japanese law specifically forbids you from paying people for unused leave because the government thought companies would force people to work until they dropped, then take the payout.
We're very slowly getting better about this. There is at least one twenty-something male at my company other than me who actually takes all his vacation days every year. (He also left at 5:30 for much of my first year at the company... and stopped after he was informed that, quote, he was less Japanese than Patrick is.)