I am not a regular on the A-Train, but I suspect Tokyo’s subway system is more ruthlessly punctual. Several years ago, on a business trip to Japan, I made the awful faux pas of clipping the stiletto heel of my rather stern interpreter with my own shoe as we were about to board a train. I watched, in horror, as her patent leather footwear gently spiralled onto the track, leaving her standing on one leg, like a stranded flamingo.
A guard was summoned and, after examining a fabulously intricate timetable, he jumped onto the track to retrieve the lost shoe. Coming from London, I couldn’t see the point of checking a schedule, especially as the trains were arriving every two or three minutes. Where I come from, a timetable would have provided little, if any, clue as to whether the next District line train would arrive in 15 seconds (splat) or 15 minutes.
After living in Tokyo for five years I have learnt that even crowded commuter trains run to the second. I have literally set my watch by a bullet train’s scheduled arrival time.
Japan’s legendary efficiency has little to do with technology – as is sometimes supposed – and much more to do with people’s attitude to work. If you watch Tokyo’s subway guards, you’ll notice that they run everywhere, as if they were on army manoeuvres. So do waiters and waitresses. And post office staff.
Everywhere you look, the Japanese work with a speed and efficiency that cannot fail to produce puzzled (if admiring) head-shaking from outsiders. Construction workers perform callisthenics to recorded music before starting their 6am shift with a company song and a deep bow to their supervisor. Assembly workers practise ways of eliminating unnecessary movements that might cost fractions of a second when they could be building cars or photocopiers. I once visited a Canon assembly plant outside Shanghai fitted with an electronic sensor to ensure that staff entered the factory floor at optimum speed. About a year later, anti- Japanese riots swept across China – though this may have been purely coincidental.
For the foreigner living in Tokyo, all this efficiency is a joy to sit back and behold. But is the Japanese dedication to work entirely healthy?
Of late, there has been a spate of television programmes on the subject of work-life balance. Tellingly, the phrase is usually rendered in the katakana script used for imported concepts. One Japanese ex-colleague recently pulled her new boss aside, saying she wanted to discuss her quality of life. When he objected to her using an English term, she said it took her 30 seconds to work out how to say “quality of life” in Japanese.
Another woman, a government employee, tells me she gets up at 5.30am every morning to prepare her husband’s breakfast, which they eat together for 20 minutes (or was that 22?) before he dashes to work. By the time he returns, near midnight, she is fast asleep. “My son sees so little of his father that when my husband tries to hug him, he says: ‘Daddy, yuk.’”
Part of the problem is overtime. Junior staff sit around shuffling papers, reluctant to leave the office until their boss makes his move. Bosses often stay only because they don’t want subordinates to think they are shirkers.
A director at the ministry of trade and industriousness tells me there is an emerging consensus that life is just as important as work: “When I was younger, I always left the office at 1 or 2am. Now things are much better,” he says brightly; “I usually leave by midnight at the latest.”
I discussed the subject a few weeks ago with Akie Abe, wife of the prime minister. In the press, Mrs Abe is portrayed as someone who lives life to the fullest. It turns out she spends much of her time trudging around the country drumming up support for her husband. The couple are lucky to eat together, even on the weekend. “In that sense we are living separate lives,” she said.
Yet Japanese working practices are changing fast. Largely due to corporate restructuring, the number of part-time employees has rocketed to about 30 per cent of the workforce. The problem is that part-time workers, often disparagingly known as “freeters” – a Japanese corruption of “free” and “arbeiter” – are seen as little better than work-shy bums.
Never mind that many had no alternative in the 1990s hiring freeze and that others have deliberately chosen to sacrifice income and security for flexibility and free time. A visit to a Starbucks or an ultra- efficient call centre will quickly disprove any prejudice that freeters are less diligent than full-timers.
In a recent discussion on changing work practices, one panellist said freeters were “a backward-looking group”. To be sure, there is nothing glamorous about being trapped in a low-paid, dead-end job. Yet many of Japan’s freeters, in their reassessment of work-life balance, point the way as much to the future as to the past.
David Pilling is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief
Chrystia Freeland is away
