Want to know some facts about long hours of work in Japan? Here’s an article at Mainichi Shimbun discussing its deep causes, what it means to the society, what to expect in the future. Some of the highlights of the article is as follows:

Q: How long do Japanese people work?

A: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conducted a survey of working hours in Japan, the U.S., Britain, France and Germany, and found that Japanese work an average of 1,784 hours per year. This is 13 hours less than the Americans, who work the longest, but 348 hours longer than the Germans, who work only 1,436 hours. Another survey of 18 developed nations indicates that 28.1 percent of Japanese workers work more than 50 hours a week, the highest percentage among the surveyed nations.

Q: Do the Japanese have fewer holidays?

A: In western nations, it’s normal for workers to take two to four weeks of vacation in summertime or at Christmas. In contrast, while Japanese workers are entitled to an average of 17.7 days of paid vacation every year, in 2006 they actually took only 8.3 of those days off, only about 46 percent of their entitlement. In addition, although the Child Care and Family Care Leave Law allows both men and women to take parental leave, only 0.5 percent of men took the leave in 2005. The law has become a mere facade.

Q: Is working too long a problem for society as a whole?

A: Japan is becoming an increasingly aged society, with a declining birthrate. If we don’t create an environment where everyone can work efficiently and easily, industries are in danger of stagnating. Companies are beginning to see the danger, and some are making efforts to cut overtime and to get more people to take childcare leave. The only way to succeed is for both management and labor to change the way they think.

I kind of get what Miss Takamura is saying about the blurring of “authority and responsibility”, and that there is really no clear cut definition where one’s responsibility begins and ends. The point of course is that employees need to be a team player, and clear cut definition is unnecessary if you all do your best. The problem is that not all do their best. For example, say you have a team mate who takes his or her time comfortably without a care in the world, then you are sometimes forced to wait and most of the time to do all the job for that team mate of yours just so you could finish the responsibility of the whole team which you are a part of. Therefore the whole team suffers by working or waiting long hours. This is understandable in the workers level, what’s not understandable is how the management can’t seem to decide how to approach this problem - the “authority” issue.

According to a 2006 survey of couples with children compiled by the Ministry of Public Management (and reported here), husbands work an average of 8 hours 50 minutes while their wives work for 9 hours 14 minutes daily. If only household chores and child-rearing hours are considered, then wives work 4 hours 7 minutes while the husbands work a measly 31 minutes.

Even with working couples, the husbands leave household work to their wives.

Daily working hours of husbands and wives (in minutes)

About 14,000 working couples were surveyed for the project. The men generally work longer hours (8 hours 19 minutes) outside the home while the women’s work is shorter (5 hours 7 minutes). The free time for childless couples or those who have grown children is about 4 hours for both husband and wife, while for those couples who have a child less than 3 years old, the husbands have 3 hours 10 minutes while the wives only have 2 hours 17 minutes.