I am a maniac. A less charged descriptor might be an “enthusiast”. Now Japan is a country chock full of enthusiasts. They win best pizza maker, best sommelier, best hula dancer, best shoe maker awards, etc., out gunning the Westerners who supposedly should be winning these home town advantage awards. This is a country where work is taken very seriously. Growing up in laid back Brisbane, we didn’t live to work, we worked to live. At 5.30pm most people were in the pub, the gym, the ocean, or at home getting ready for dinner. Japan took a different track.
Back in the day, working late wasn’t about productivity, because it was all about devotion, being part of the team, pulling your weight, in order to be taken seriously. In the late 1970s, I taught English at night while I was a student here at Jochi University, usually from 6.30pm – 9.30pm. I was always amazed to finish the classes and walking out see all of these people still there working. Many of them, though, I observed, were seemingly engrossed in reading the sports newspapers or magazines, rather than doing anything productive. But they were there, waiting for the boss to go home so that they could do the same thing, demonstrating their solidarity with the others, also in wait to depart.
Thirteen years later, I was going through piles of resumes for salespeople here in Japan looking to join our organisation. This resume review process of mine has been going on for the last thirty-two years now. I noticed people would have blank periods in their employ. Job mobility today is better, but that is a fairly recent phenomenon after the collapse of Yamaichi Securities (1999), the Lehman Shock (2008) and the pandemic (2020) had all thrown people out on to the street and over time, allowed the mid-career hire to become acceptable. Back in the day, leaving a job meant a steady spiral down in socio-economic terms and so most people hung in there, no matter how bad it was.
When I would ask about these blanks in their resumes, a surprising number of people, particularly women, said they got physically sick from working until the last train every night and had to quit to recover their health. These were not isolated cases and many of the blanks were for months at a time, which made me really wonder about the cost of getting a salary and holding down a job in Japan.
We have made a lot of progress since then and I think that there is much higher awareness about getting the work done in less time and allowing people to have a life outside of work. Young people are now all the equivalent of baseball free agents and can sell their services to the highest bidder, including demanding and getting, better work/life balance. We should all be throwing rose petals in front of them and waving palm fronds above them, to thank them for allowing the rest of us to be more clever about how we work.
The problem we face now is not externally induced pressure for working long hours, but the internally driven ambition to get ahead and in the process work like Trojans. Thanks to technology, there is now no longer a clear “work/non-work” break in the day, because we are checking our emails all day and night. We are addicted to being in constant contact with our work demands.
I mentioned I am a maniac and this constant checking of emails is what I am doing, too. I could try to manufacture the justification that because we are a global organisation, email is arriving all the time and I need to be on top of what is happening in other time zones, but is that really true? Would a few hours delay really make that big a difference? Are there actually real fires occurring which require me to don my big coat and grab the fire hose?
What is happening is habit formation and combined with screen addiction, creating a toxic cocktail for all of us. One of Dale Carnegie’s stress management principes is “rest before you get tired”. On first blush, it sounds ridiculous. What are we wimps? Do we lack ambition, the guts to pay the price for success? No, we have to push through the pain barrier and keep driving. Allow no indulgence, no mercy, no regrets, no stopping.
If we hit the pause button though and consider how much more we know today about psychosomatic illnesses than he did back in his day, we can see the prescient wisdom of his advice. It doesn’t mean goofing off; it doesn’t mean delinquent behaviour and work avoidance. He was talking about monitoring our condition to always aim for maximum productivity, and that means sustained productivity.
I think I have improved now, but I would work like crazy and drive myself hard, get sick, then be off work for days and once recovered, rinse and repeat. What if I had taken his advice and rested before I got tired? Now I have broken that cycle and placed myself in a better position to have sustained productivity, rather than manic bursts followed by zero.
Japan keeps us busy, the tech is making us even busier and these issues won’t go away. We have to play the long game, not the blame game. If you are a fellow manic like me, then stop the noise for a moment and seriously contemplate what “rest before you get tired” actually means for your life.
