When I was on my way home one night at about 10p.m. , I saw people getting off a shuttle bus and get in the station ( photo above). They seemed so tired.
Other night, I saw a worker sitting and completely asleep.
Actually, these sights are nothing uncommon. We can see such people anywhere in Japan and I know they are overworked.
The moment for me to look for a job has come. These days, I look at job adds and compare the information in them. I often think not which one has less work time but which one would require less over time...
"The Japanese work too much", that fact is well known but I didn't know the causes of overwork.
I found the term "shigotochyuudoku no nihonjin (workaholic japanese)"in a book called
"Sekaiga warau nihonno johshiki ( The funny Japanese common sense)". I wondered if all foreigners had such stereotype. I remembered that one of my friend had suffered from overwork some time ago, then I asked her about this.
She got a "best salesperson" award along with a big bonus. However, she would work from 8a.m. to 2a.m. the following morning and still brought work to do at home. Her health quickly deteriorated.
"I had to work that much because the company was trying to lower costs and forced workers to do a huge amount of job." she said, giving a bitter smile.
I found some other reasons for Japanese working too much time in a book called "Endless Workers" by Kazuya Ogura. The photo above shows some data from the book.
After reading this book, I got to the conclusion that the majority of Japanese who answered the questionnaire gave the following reasons:
"Trying to do perfect tasks by deadlines."
"It can't be helped, everyone else does it ."
A few of them said they would rather work overtime than getting back home; others, that they really loved their job.
Not all Japanese are workaholics. In fact, many Japanese want to escape from overtime working.
Some Japanese workers who keep working overtime end up being like this.
1 件のコメント:
Our topic this week is "Japanese People," or more specifically how we as anthropologist go about representing a group of people. Your focus on (over)work is interesting and topical. We read more and more about this topic in the news recently. I especially like how you include your own personal concerns (I'd like to read more about this).
Your second photo is problematic in that it really doesn't illustrate what you are talking about very well. (Do you say specifically what the data says?) Also, there might be some copyright issues with you photographing and publishing another's work. We want to be careful in this respect.
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