FAREWELL TO KAROSHI NIGHTS

A remarkable piece of data has emerged from Tokyo today - relevant to a poignant visual and written project we created last year - part of which is below. In the bleak heart of Covid-19, suicide has fallen in Japan by 20%. The truth is the end of the endless commute under lockdown and the delay of the academic year (April in Japan) a particularly stressful time for children, has actually saved people, young and old, from themselves.

For statisticians and academics, the lockdown is actually increasing our understanding of society and this will be an issue worth vigorously exploring in the near future. From a storytelling perspective, this living lab effectively provides a mirror for our institutionalised and conditioned lives.

We founded Miran, as a content hybrid between documentary journalism and social impact content with the aim of encouraging the global organisations we work with, to negotiate emotionally challenging storytelling territory. To confront the unknown or travel to the ends of the earth to find the story.

Last year we collaborated with Workday California to create a powerful project around work stress and suicide in Japan - some of our poignant images below. Given our own knowledge of this issue, we shared the fears of academics that the pandemic would cause increased stress in Japan's urban centres - with many prevention helplines not operating and staff being furloughed.

Yet the truth is people spending more time at home with their families, and fewer urbanites commuting to work, has effectively removed the disconnect from their loved ones that often haunts Japan's salaried masses. In the heart of Covid-19, these same "ex-commuters" are sitting around tables talking to their wives, reading bedtime stories to their children and, somehow, in the midst of an unprecedented crisis, finding time to breathe - perhaps finding equilibrium.

The experience of living in this new home-centred world and returning to the 12 hour day will present the toughest challenge in a generation. For many salarymen and salarywomen, the thought of the long and lonely commute that ends with them kissing their sleeping children on the forehead, is, perhaps, unimaginable.

IT’s 1 am in Marunouchi. Stretched out in isolation along the metro platform, salarymen in grey suits curl up, foetal position, nuzzled into the cold steel of vending machines. Around them, the click of heels and the whirring of cleaning machines perform a soporific soundtrack.

The outsider might well see them as drunks and some are – but most are overworked businessmen and women that have passed out on the streets due to a lack of sleep or too many hours of overtime. Some will return to their office cubicles at 6 am from this point of collapse. Rejuvenated by a blind work ethic and Kirin’s Fire coffee.

For many, the platform floor will be the culmination of a 14-hour day. It might even be their second nap of the day. Across work life in Japan napping in the office, or indeed the street is common and culturally accepted. The word for it is “inemuri” roughly translated as “sleeping on duty,” On the corporate ladder it is seen as a subtle sign of diligence in a society where even working yourself to death has a name. Karoshi.

The five busiest train stations in the world are here in Japan. It’s a staggering statistic and one that is rarely reported. The top three are in Tokyo. Ikebukuro Station. Shibuya Station with it large, eye-catching artwork from Taro Okamoto and leading the pack, Shinjuku Station, built to handle over one million daily commuters.

In the fast-beating heart of Tokyo, one of the most vibrant commercial centres in the history of mankind, the circadian rhythm, the 24-hour cycle, that dictates our lives, seems to be largely ignored. Here not even sunlight and temperature can impact this disrupted work cycle that runs beyond the logic of time. For some, it is a place where there is barely any time for life.

Japan is rightly worried about the health and happiness of its citizens. The government of PM Shinzo Abe has been so seriously looking into the issue of Work Style Reform that it recently approved a bill, specifically aimed at addressing the nation’s chronic overwork problem.  

The Abe administration bill now consists of three pillars: Setting a legal cap on overtime work; ensuring equal treatment for regular and non-regular workers, and exempting skilled professional workers with high wages from working-hour regulations. The bill meanwhile sets the legal overtime cap at 100 hours per month and 720 hours per year and stipulates that companies that violate the limits will face punishment.

Citizen’s groups made up largely of family members of karōshi victims, individuals who have either killed themselves or died as a consequence of overwork, have been instrumental in drawing attention to the issue. 

Yet the solution to the crisis, many of them believe, will not only be legislative but also the adoption of a change of working culture, enabled by technology which helps to monitor and streamline productivity in the workplace. Already some of Japan’s biggest companies are reviewing their IT systems to prepare for the reforms, and such moves are benefitting system suppliers. Time-management system maker, Amano, is planning to sell its human resource management systems to small- and medium-sized companies, enabling clients to monitor the real-time working hours of employees. Nomura Research Institute has provided an artificial intelligence system to help cut unnecessary human working hours.

The reality for many Japanese corporations is simple: If they wish to remain, world leaders, then they must also attract and retain talent and a new study has revealed that can no longer be taken for granted.

A recent independent survey, commissioned by the American software giant, Workday, has revealed that Japan`s Traditional Employment Practices Do Not Fit Today`s Realities in The Digital Economy. The study suggests that Japanese employees feel unprepared for the digital economy and that many are disengaged and unhappy at work with a troubling percentage of employees planning to switch jobs within 12 months.

The Workday commissioned IDC survey, released at Elevate Tokyo showed, that contrary to Japan`s traditional lifetime employment practice, 23% of employees plan to leave their current job within a year.  The top reasons for changing jobs in Japan were perhaps, unsurprisingly, linked to compensation (23%), job security (14%) and work/life balance (13%). An alarming 60% of respondents in Japan also felt their employers and managers were not proactively engaging them to “future-proof” their careers, while 43% feel that their employer wasn’t enabling them with the right skills to be productive and competitive in the digital economy. 

According to Rob Wells, the President, Workday Japan, the fact that the nations working culture is coming under international scrutiny is a sign that things are coming to head. He said: “Japan`s traditional employment practices, which include lifetime employment, do not fit with the disruptive digital economy. The war for talent is real and fierce, and it is being played out throughout the entire region, Japan is not removed from this. The research we commissioned shows that employees feel they don’t have the right skills for the digital economy, and they are apprehensive about digital transformation. This is an opportunity for employees to reconsider employee engagement and retention strategies including training and career development.”

Although technology needs to be seen as a vital cog in the wheel. To enable change at grassroots level managers at Japanese firms must ultimately be weaned of the erroneous belief that long hours are a necessary part of doing business. They should also, perhaps, think out of the box, and look to countries like Germany, France, and Sweden for clues on how to boost productivity while spending less time in the office.

Secondly, the government has to take more of an interest in and direct greater resources, such as deploying technology that bolsters oversight measures. Lastly, citizens across Japan must be involved in changing work culture. This requires standing up for the rights of workers by engaging with corporations and the government, sharing their views, and criticizing antiquated and unfair labour practices. The public also needs to recognize its own culpability and work locally to engender change by fostering consumer habits that do not place an undue burden on workers in the service industry.

The truth is technologies role in enabling the safe and transparent monitoring of working practices could the “Generational” intervention that could ultimately save the next intake of graduate employees from themselves or rather what is expected of them. Above all others, it is the junior employees who push themselves to the limit. The concern is that with a shrinking number of youngsters entering the workplace and greater pressure on companies to cut costs and raise productivity, cases of karoshi will inevitably arise. The good news for Japanese society is the new law is likely to raise the incomes of non-regular workers, and lower the incomes of permanent employees. The implementation of equal pay for equal work also means that the treatment of those considered as cheap labour, including part-time, contract and temporary staff, needs to improve.

In time, perhaps within the next decade, the curled up figure, a business suit, a laptop bag and deserted train platform, could disappear from Tokyo street scenes. Although the older generation’s will tell you Inemuri has been practised in Japan for at least 1,000 years, and it is not restricted to the workplace.

They believe people have the right to nap in department stores, cafes, restaurants or even a snug spot on a busy city sidewalk but that they also do so in typically dignified Japanese fashion. One unwritten rule of inemuri, regularly misunderstood by foreigners, is to sleep compactly, without violating spatial norms. If you stretched out under the table in the office conference room, or took up several spaces on the train, or laid out on a park bench that would draw reproach, for being socially disruptive.