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Ha, ha. What a dystopian country. Except, wait, this is the very country I've been living for decades. Where to start with? First, the language. The translatio

by euske 11y ago

Ha, ha. What a dystopian country. Except, wait, this is the very country I've been living for decades. Where to start with? First, the language. The translation of the common phrase, "Otsukare sama desu" isn't "you look tired" (this is already a misleading and insidious tactic to set the whole tone). The phrase is roughly synonymous to "Gokurou sama desu" but with more sympathy. The literal translation would be "it's hardwork-sama (Mr/Ms. hardwork)", and there's a reason that we use honorifics, which is to admire one's effort. I can't have a word for the gross exaggeration of the work hours in the article, but I'm certain that one of the big reasons for some people to overwork is not loyalty, but fear. It's often said in Japan "incompetent men tend to overwork" and I find it generally true. In this society of lifetime employment, getting fired or demoted at work has very serious consequences. So they often use their long work hours as an excuse or emotional appeal, which can (sadly) still work. But from what I've seen many managements actually hate the employee's over hours because it's costly and inefficient. It's just that it takes a time to change the people's mindset, but I think the situations are slowly getting improved. It is probably true that we have more perfectionist/anal-retentive kind of people, but again they're generally the result of fear rather than enthusiasm or moral, because their anal-retentiveness doesn't necessarily result in quality work. A lot of lengthy and pointless paperwork, excess bureaucracy, etc, etc. I pity those people, and hope we have more social mobility to dissolve their anxiety.

OSButler 11y ago
Costly? I was under the impression that this kind of overtime isn't compensated in a lot of cases? I've heard one reasoning that if they wouldn't do the (free) overtime, then there wouldn't be a company for them to work at, as it couldn't afford to pay their employees then. However, this was a mid-sized local business and not a multi-national corporation.
- hardwaresofton 11y ago
  Yes, lots of unpaid overtime being worked in Japan by salarymen. At the very least, the recent college grads do it (I've heard first hand accounts, though I guess that's basically hearsay to anyone reading this).
- ranko 11y ago
  The price of overtime to an employer isn't only (or even mostly) the pay - it's also the impact on the rest of the employee's work. Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister claim in "Peopleware" that "there will be more or less an hour of undertime for every hour of overtime".
hardwaresofton 11y ago
While I don't actually live in Japan right now, I can guarantee you that the majority of time people spend at the office in Japan is not actual productive work time (though you could maybe say the same about white collar jobs like software engineering in the US). While anecdotal, I visit relatively often, and every time I talk to friends at various types of companies in Japan (ex. an investment/securities trading firm, nikon, etc) about how work life is there, the complaints I hear the most are really just related to what has become ingrained in the work culture there. Things like: - Not leaving before your boss leaves - Going to after-work functions that are optional, but not really - Constantly maintaining the appearance of working hard by working long hours - Lots of top-down bullying (ex. some manager asking a subordinate to completely redo some report for no reason other than to make them work) - Lack of overtime pay from companies (if companies were properly paying overtime, they'd be in a hurry to increase productivity, not time spent at the office) There are many more things like this that are just a part of the culture, that everyone has just accepted. Recent explosion of startup culture (and startups) in Japan is changing this, though, slowly and surely. Foreign companies in Japan already have good reputations for having great work/life balance because our normal work culture is so much more lax. Another anecdotal but more specific example is a japanese friend that I know working in NYC -- this friend works for a Japanese company that has essentially replicated a lot of the bad parts of the culture they have there here, in the foreign office. This friend knows that just about any other business in the same sector (that wasn't a japanese subsidiary) would be way better.
- RyanZAG 11y ago
  It's pretty sad, really. This is actually a company sabotaging itself. Each additional hour of work isn't "free" for the company - you can't add an extra hour of work to someone and expect the other hours worked won't be affected. Sitting around waiting for a boss to leave or re-doing work just means that the employee is going to do the rest of his work worse whether he wants to or not. Japan forcing overtime pay would probably be the single best way to boost their entire economy. I'm guessing they will never do it for unfortunate cultural reasons though.
sdrothrock 11y ago
> I can't have a word for the gross exaggeration of the work hours in the article I'm assuming that it's true for a small subset of the lawyers who do the kind of work that the author is talking about and apparently has personal experience with... but it's definitely not true for the entire [edit: country].

by euske 11y ago

OSButler 11y ago

Costly? I was under the impression that this kind of overtime isn't compensated in a lot of cases? I've heard one reasoning that if they wouldn't do the (free) overtime, then there wouldn't be a company for them to work at, as it couldn't afford to pay their employees then. However, this was a mid-sized local business and not a multi-national corporation.

hardwaresofton 11y ago
Yes, lots of unpaid overtime being worked in Japan by salarymen. At the very least, the recent college grads do it (I've heard first hand accounts, though I guess that's basically hearsay to anyone reading this).
ranko 11y ago
The price of overtime to an employer isn't only (or even mostly) the pay - it's also the impact on the rest of the employee's work. Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister claim in "Peopleware" that "there will be more or less an hour of undertime for every hour of overtime".

hardwaresofton 11y ago

While I don't actually live in Japan right now, I can guarantee you that the majority of time people spend at the office in Japan is not actual productive work time (though you could maybe say the same about white collar jobs like software engineering in the US). While anecdotal, I visit relatively often, and every time I talk to friends at various types of companies in Japan (ex. an investment/securities trading firm, nikon, etc) about how work life is there, the complaints I hear the most are really just related to what has become ingrained in the work culture there. Things like: - Not leaving before your boss leaves - Going to after-work functions that are optional, but not really - Constantly maintaining the appearance of working hard by working long hours - Lots of top-down bullying (ex. some manager asking a subordinate to completely redo some report for no reason other than to make them work) - Lack of overtime pay from companies (if companies were properly paying overtime, they'd be in a hurry to increase productivity, not time spent at the office) There are many more things like this that are just a part of the culture, that everyone has just accepted. Recent explosion of startup culture (and startups) in Japan is changing this, though, slowly and surely. Foreign companies in Japan already have good reputations for having great work/life balance because our normal work culture is so much more lax. Another anecdotal but more specific example is a japanese friend that I know working in NYC -- this friend works for a Japanese company that has essentially replicated a lot of the bad parts of the culture they have there here, in the foreign office. This friend knows that just about any other business in the same sector (that wasn't a japanese subsidiary) would be way better.

RyanZAG 11y ago
It's pretty sad, really. This is actually a company sabotaging itself. Each additional hour of work isn't "free" for the company - you can't add an extra hour of work to someone and expect the other hours worked won't be affected. Sitting around waiting for a boss to leave or re-doing work just means that the employee is going to do the rest of his work worse whether he wants to or not. Japan forcing overtime pay would probably be the single best way to boost their entire economy. I'm guessing they will never do it for unfortunate cultural reasons though.

sdrothrock 11y ago

> I can't have a word for the gross exaggeration of the work hours in the article I'm assuming that it's true for a small subset of the lawyers who do the kind of work that the author is talking about and apparently has personal experience with... but it's definitely not true for the entire [edit: country].