Like many Japanese commercials, this TV spot for the Regain energy drink reinforces product message with a playful sense of hyperbole. But note the presuppositions about labor goals inherent in the narrative. A train is delayed, so the salaryman army hauls it over land and sea and air in order to…. make it to work on time. And we know that this is the ultimate goal, because our hero checks his watch, says “Yes!” and does that fisted arm pull, which I guess has become the universal symbol for “Yes!”

Now, some bosses may have said, “I would rather you have been 15 minutes late and charged us for a cab than broken all of the windows of our meeting room,” but this commercial pretty much supports the idea that being an “ideal worker” in Japan is not about attaining pragmatic goals, increasing profitability, nailing a presentation, or closing deals, but rather punctuality. When the former actions are targets, being a bit late for work isn’t a problem, and hell, a more enterprising worker would have found a local wifi’d Starbucks and done his morning calls until train service starts back up. I mean, there’s no way every single member of this black-suit labor army had a morning meeting. Most of them just probably felt the need to get to the office on time so that they could grab the sole copy of Nikkei’s Marketing Journal and have enough time to take the normal morning’s two to three cigarette breaks.

Again, we see an example of Japanese orthopraxical conceptions of identity and membership: i.e., it is less about what you do at work and more about being punctual, properly suited, showing ambition and effort through strict adherence to rules like punch-in time. I can’t imagine an energy drink commercial showing a suave, rebellious salaryman wearing a light grey suit (with those orange loafers!), showing up late, flouting company policy, but then closing a huge deal to buffer his managers’ chagrin. This guy can’t be a hero in an orthopraxical environment: he’s just an asshole. Labor excellence is all about punctuality and similar values.

Cultures are free to choose their own routes to salvation and judgment criteria on individual performance, but I do wonder how this kind of process-oriented conception of work holds up in a more globalized world. The international capitalist view of the workforce is increasingly less concerned with creating a loyal regiment of young men with shiny shoes and polished brass accouterments who properly salute and say, “Sir, yes, sir!” and more concerned with, I don’t know, worker productivity and profitability. Do Japanese companies have a global advantage in promoting this sort of performance evaluation based on minor rule-adherence as the fundamental management strategy?

The other question is “work/life balance,” which Japanese people claim to desire, but is never going to happen when you get bonus points for staying in the office as long as possible regardless to amount of work. How would this hypothetical TV commercial play in Japan: a guy drinks Regain and is able to do eight hours of work in five hours, thus letting him go home early, beat the commuter rush, and spend quality time with his wife and children? Seems like a stinker to me.

The Japanese government is setting up another task force to tackle the difficult issue of work-life balance. Experts will come together to figure out how working hours can be effectively curbed.

Any Western spectator of Japanese business life will immediately bemoan the absurdly long hours expected of company employees. Work may end at 6:30 at many Japanese firms, but punching the clock at 6:31 is like sticking your chopsticks straight up in a bowl of rice. In the past, there may have been a hierarchical duty to stay longer than your own boss or go out drinking with management, but even as that corporate culture fades into the past, you do not see new employees out the door at a decent hour.

Long hours, however, do not mean high worker productivity. In the past, Japan has fared worse than Italy on this measure, and we can unscientifically assume that the Italians are getting a leisurely riposo in there while the Japanese drones buy a convenience store bento and eat at their desks for 15 minutes.

So cutting working hours in Japan is ironically an attempt to increase productivity: the article states “companies could boost the productivity of their employees because they will try to finish work in a limited time and will work efficiently.” Getting everyone home early could also lead to many positive social externalities, including more parental involvement in child-raising and less sleep deprivation in the general population. Objectively speaking, there are few downsides to limiting work hours. Perhaps the firms themselves lose huge amounts of free overtime hours, but this new plan promises to give them higher productivity in return.

Westerners immediately decry the madness if not the moral offense of workers slaving away at their companies until the wee hours of the nights. Liberal enlightenment ideas of the individual having free reign over his own self-definition tend to resent the concept of the “company man” — where individuals are reduced to inputs. Marxists believe that the worker must pursue self-actualization that puts the fruits of his labor within his own hands and not the capitalist’s.

Work-life balance, however, is a completely loaded Western liberal concept because it creates a dichotomy between work and life — as if they are antagonizing forces. The Confucian-Statist philosophical underpinning of modern Japanese society assigns each individual a specific, unmalleable role and posits self-actualization as the loyal and perfect performance of that role. Conditioning of these beliefs starts early: young athletes choose to play one sport for their academic careers and do not change sports with the seasons like you see in other nations. Baseball players are baseball players. In general, Japanese people have one hobby, which leads to the famously maniacal dedication to certain “ridiculous” pursuits like competitive eating or obsession with a single fashion brand.

Since the Meiji Restoration, citizens of Japan have been able to choose their destiny and occupation without adhering to the strict Neo-Confucian caste system of warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants (士農工商) seen in the Tokugawa era. However, once the die is cast at 22 and the individual enters the company, corporate duty becomes “life.” There may be other familial duties, but the general culture clearly places these as secondary — especially in a gender-divided society where women alone are expected to embody “family” and all its subsequent duties. The “firm as family” ideology may have been invented in the early 20th century as a convenient form of labor control (that echoes the “nation as family” rhetoric of the kokutai [國體]), but even without the idea of “family ties” creating corporate loyalty, there remains a fundamental Confucian understanding of one’s place in the world being a fixed locus within Heaven’s order and not a progressive position of man’s choosing. These days the “family firm” belief is drying out with the rise of tenshoku (転職) mid-career company change. Workers may choose new masters once and a while, but once the movement is made, long hours remain a key part of the corporate life. Because again, corporate life is life.

Eradicating this belief will be extremely difficult — barring some kind of Romantic revolution. The number of freeters is apparently dropping, echoing the original analysis that these young people could not find full-time employment and were not willfully eschewing it. The low birth-rate and unwillingness to open up immigration do not help the drive for lower hours: the OECD estimates that productivity will have to increase and hours stay at current levels in order to make up for the smaller future workforce. Retirement will also have to be pushed back. State economic goals have almost always trumped individual rights in Japan, so I do not think the government will actually pursue a true course of “free time” that could cut into GDP growth. But more importantly, a large percentage of the population possesses a core belief that identity can only be attained through organizational dedication and that long-hours are a key part of that role performance. The government can mandate holidays, but they will have a real challenge to erase the base social ideology of (at least) the last two centuries. One can make the claim that these popular beliefs have their roots in elite social control, but even in that case, the elite will have to erase the effects of their massive success in completely legitimizing demands for worker duty.

If you think lower work hours will be a part of Japanese culture soon, you must be dreaming. And if you are dreaming, you are sleeping well. And if you are sleeping well, you are clearly not working enough!