Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Well, I’m a Malaysian Chi­nese and my direct boss is a Japan­ese. We work 5 days a week but my boss just so oftenly ask me to work late of work on Sat­ur­day, which seems to me, those work can be done any­time in nor­mal work­ing hours.

From what I’ve learned, his defi­ca­tion of hard­work­ing is sim­ple, work­ing over­time. And he is proud of work­ing late himself.

As many of my cus­tomers are Japan­ese, I have found that work­ing late is com­mon among them.

This week, he has asked me to work on Sat­u­day too. But I have refused him because I want to spend some time with my fam­ily. I’ve missed last two week­ends with them.

I’m look­ing for another job which wouldn’t need to work so late, even at the cost of of half salary. I don’t want to become a man like my boss who has no life except work.

Hi cclim

Thank you for your comment!

I under­stand what you are going through and sym­pa­thize with you.
It seems that half the peo­ple in the world is always liv­ing in the past.
Cling­ing onto the past glory or hard­ship. Many Japan­ese work­ers talk about the impor­tance of hav­ing life out­side of work, and most of the major com­pa­nies in Japan even have some days in the week that forces peo­ple out of the office at 17:30 once a week. The secu­rity guards come into the offices and escort out the peo­ple who are still in the offices after this time!

This is one of com­pa­nies’ effort to reduce stress, depres­sion, sui­cides from over­work in Japan now.

I do hope you will soon work­ing at a place that has sat­is­fy­ing job and sat­is­fy­ing work hours.

Fuji

From my lim­ited expe­ri­ence (of the Japan­ese in Turkey), there’s a deep com­mu­ni­tar­i­an­ism rooted in the Japan­ese cul­ture. So even if you do not want to work long hours, you feel oblig­ated because every­one else is doing it.

The cul­ture part of this phe­nom­ena can even be seen in the lan­guage. There are plethora of words related to hard work. One of this is “karoshi” which means “death from over­work”. Yet another one is “inemuri” which rep­re­sents sleep­ing on the job (my Japan­ese friend says he once slept on the train while stand­ing still).

This is very inter­est­ing to me. On the one hand you might expect the cre­ativ­ity to be hit, but in real­ity the Japan­ese have some of the most cre­ative prod­ucts. I’ll be damned if I under­stand this dichotomy (does it have roots from Con­fu­cian­ism, or is it because of the WW2. defeat? when did this start ).

Thanks for your nice blog, greet­ings from Turkey!

Thank you for your com­ment, tayfun!

What I feel about Japan­ese cre­ativ­ity in gen­eral is that as cul­ture, Japan­ese aren’t good at con­tin­u­ous thoughts or com­mu­ni­ca­tion in cohi­sive flow, but good at express­ing the thoughts in products.

Great to con­nect with you virtually!

Fuji