The Japanese work a lot. They’re taught to from childhood. If you don’t go to extra classes in elementary school, you won’t get into a good middle school. If you don’t attend the evening “juku” cram schools in middle school, you won’t get into high school. And so on. In short, if you survived the academic race and didn’t throw yourself under a train, then by the time you finish university you’re used to grinding from morning to night.
And this habit comes in very handy in the corporate world.
Japan has had a code of honor since time immemorial. Today it lives on beautifully in the corporate sphere. Leaving work before your boss does is a gross violation of that code.
The boss, naturally, stays late — he’s got his own boss to prove himself to. So everyone stays late. If you try to simply stand up and leave, the shame will be off the charts. It’s the equivalent of walking up and spitting in the face of every coworker, one by one. People just won’t get it. So most office workers sit at their desks long after the official end of the day.
By law, you get on average 15 vacation days a year in Japan. To be precise, in your first year you’re entitled to only ten, and by your sixth you can take all twenty.
But taking 10 days in a row is unacceptable. Five, max. And even then, to go on vacation you have to publicly apologize to the team. After all, they’ll be left working in your place while you — you unworthy slacker — go off to rest. So you take a serious sense of guilt along on your holiday. And when you’re back, you have to apologize to everyone for your absence. Publicly repent for having rested while others worked.
So because of all these conventions, many Japanese don’t take vacation at all. It’s easier to just sit it out at work and feel no guilt.
From this comes the phenomenon of “karoshi” — death from overwork at the workplace.
With diligence like that, the Japanese should have overtaken the whole world economically long ago. In absolute terms they’re still in third place, after China and the US. In GDP per capita — 27th (per the IMF ranking). I’ll venture a guess that the culture gets in the way.
Remember their excessive politeness? Europeans say that working in a Japanese corporation is like pushing through a thick, alien medium. As if you’re knee-deep in a swamp of conventions: you try to run, but all you manage is a few polite twitches on the spot.
Either way, Russia sits at only 48th in that same per-capita ranking. So there’s plenty to learn from here too.
What’s the point of all this? I’ve always said — it doesn’t matter what motivates you, as long as the motivation works. In Western countries the motivator might be prestige consumption. In Japan there’s almost none of that culture. But there is a code of honor. And it works great.