Like many Japanese commercials, the new 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 at some point became 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 gray 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 a very simplified expression of dedication.

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 of actual 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!

As reported on 2ch’s Itai News Blog, Kinki University in Osaka is telling juniors they must take a job right outside of graduation in the traditional “shinsotsu saiyou” (新卒採用) system. Why? “Because there are no second chances.” (「２度とチャンスはありません。」) What about becoming a freeter? “Your life will come to nothing.” (「フリータやニートになっては，人生台無しです。」) Surely, waiting to apply a year or two after college, you could still get a job based on your qualifications, right? “Dead wrong. Society will not accept you. Why? Because those who did not start working right outside of graduation are leftovers and defective merchandise.” (「卒業してからでも大卒の資格で何とかなるわ…と思ったら大間違いです。 社会は受け入れてくれません。 何故なら，新卒で就職出来ていない人は落ちこぼれであり，欠陥品だからです。」)

All of the 2ch commenters of course agree with this harsh analysis, and the message does not conflict with the standard understanding of Japanese education/employment systems. Let’s face it: Perfectly ordered society and second-chances are opposites. The only way to enforce order is to guarantee that those going around the determined path will be permanently punished. The kid doesn’t even get the chance to cry “wolf” the first time? Problem solved. Taking a year off to study for Tokyo University exams is one thing, but taking a year off to think about what you would like to do for the rest of your life… might as well be treason.

As much as the post-Bubble period was host to greater “Americanization” of the economy, the rigid employment system is facing no serious challenge. In fact, with more and more companies creating two distinct classes of “regular” and “non-regular” workers, the shinsotsu system becomes crucial for determining who gets to join the upper middle classes and who gets to receive the same limp salary for 30 years — within the same companies, even. Successfully making it to a four-year university in the first place means you have access to a possible corporate track job, and clearly, Kinki U. does not want to see their young get swept out into the harsh winter colds from which there is no return.

One of Prime Minister Honest Abe’s big ideas for Japan is the “second chance initiative” for failed businesses. Students, however, may not be afforded that luxury. At least they will know at 22 whether their lives are total failures or not. Most people have to wait 40 years to find that out on their own.

Being the stereotypically uncouth American, the proverbial unruly bull in the particularly fragile china shop, I intentionally decided to search for gainful employment this spring without undertaking one of Japan’s great social rituals: shuushoku katsudou, the rigid and formal three-to-four month job search conducted at the beginning of the university student’s fourth year. Had I made like my fellow graduates and spent the first months of 2005 attending informational meetings of three dozen companies and then revisiting firms up to eight times for round after round of interviews, I would have most likely found myself with a splendid naitei (内定, informal acceptance) from the physical distribution management division of an esteemed meat manufacturer and coasted through my last year without a single worry about my future. (Except, perhaps, the eternal question — IRA vs. Roth IRA?)

Instead, I chose to dedicate my time to my thesis, and this vile act of hubris meant a somewhat chaotic and unpredictable last three months of job hunting. Things worked out very well in the end, but even one of my interviewers asked me point blank, “Uhh… why is it that you didn’t look for a job a year before your graduation like everyone else?” I immediately admitted my folly, and promised to tell my vast online readership not to follow in my sad example.

In the days of the post-war “lifetime employment system,” college students used the brief months of shuu-katsu to plan their remaining 60 years left on Earth. At the tender age of 21, students’ ability to answer cliched questions from old grumpy men decided their entire fates. Working for former zaibatsu like Mitsubishi could mean kids in private school, drinking Blue Label mizuwari in Ginza every weeknight, and plenty of extra income to blow on differently-classed women in their late 20s. Working at a second-rate firm meant ill-fitting discount suits and reading Weekly Playboy every week for the schadenfreude. But no matter the case, you were always just picking up leftovers from the Spartan memorization kings at Tokyo University anyway.

Originally, the Game began shortly before graduation, but companies kept starting earlier and earlier to beat out rivals for access to the greatest human capital at the elite universities. Finally, a stalemate was reached, and things settled down into early Spring of the students’ fourth year. These days, foreign banks and financial institutions start up their recruitment in winter and scoop up a large number of Todai geeks before Japanese companies even have the chance.

For many obvious reasons, I decided to advertise my services in a different manner than the shinsotsu saiyou (new graduate admission) model. I was sending around sans-serif English resumes, but my future employer still required me to fill out the Japanese rirekisho (resume).

Just as I had imagined, the standard Japanese application form still reflects the stone-cold recruitment system of the Showa era. Opposed to the American style of resumes, where applicants tailor the form and content to best reflect their identity and accomplishments, young Japanese job seekers pop into their local bookstore and buy the standard blank rirekisho. The form must be completed in black pen (you can still tell everything about a person in Japan by their penmanship), and a misspelling or stray mark means starting over. The information required: name, address, school history, work history (part-time work generally not included), awards, punishments, and licenses — leaving no place to actually describe yourself in any manner of detail. The Japanese form also requires a photograph, because, unlike the message of those insipid kindergarden posters, you can certainly judge a book by its cover.

The elite white-collar salarymen of today sometimes switch jobs, so there is a more detailed chuuto saiyou (mid-career) application form. But in general, you are no more than your birthday, academic pedigree and one-sentence personal statement. (Turns out that I wanted to give my best.)

I didn’t have a lot of formal work experience, but I do a lot of crazy things that fit nowhere on a Japanese employment application, like freelance writing for American magazines, freelance research for ad firms, and a “blog” with too many readers. But if you are a Japanese student trying to curry favor with the Big Companies, the last thing you want to do is suggest that you’ve ever had anything on your mind outside of total and complete dedication to your future employer. In the old orthopraxical employment scheme, companies had their one, unique “correct” way of doing things, and employees with prior experience often posed a great threat to standard protocol.

Of course, everything in Japan is in totally flux, and the employment system is becoming somewhat more relaxed and “American.” From watching the college students in my flock over the last three years, however, my impression is that while changing jobs (tenshoku, 転職) for upper-level occupations is now a possibility, getting through the narrow gate right out of college is still an unbending requirement. Graduate school is the only acceptable alternative. Now with social stratification becoming more and more extreme, shuushoku katsudou actually seems more important than ever. That first job may not last forever, but it still sets the course.

So comb your hair and use proper stroke order, boys.

Traditionally, Japanese youth are expected to shed all their fads, fashions, radical ideologies, dreams, aspirations, and ideals upon entering the workforce — and subsequently, adulthood — in a process called tenkō（転向). Like all the youth before them, the hardcore student Marxists of the early ’60s went straight into a white-collar life after graduation. While a handful of hardhat radicals in the late ’60s/early ’70s were blacklisted for their participation in severe Leftist violence, Japan’s broader counterculture evaporated very quickly when its members turned 23 and adjusted their values back to mainstream society. To a large degree, Japanese adults’ high tolerance of extreme youth fashion stems directly from their understanding that a tenkō will instantly clear away the zoot suit to make room for the recruit suit.

In the last five years, however, there has been much speculation about whether the high number of youth without full-time employment — the freeters — were voluntarily rejecting the lives of their parents. In other words, these were possibly the first kids in history refusing to go through the tenkō process, working in a bakery four days a week to keep living a life centered on fashion, design, and music. What progress for international bohemianism!

Western scholars since the ’50s have been hoping to see the tenkō disappear, predicting that its demise was just around the corner. For example, Robert Jay Lifton in the 1961 essay “Youth and History: Individual Change in Postwar Japan” (from The Challenge of Youth) says in his concluding remarks about Japanese collegiate Marxists, “Much of what I have described may be understood as youth’s efforts to resist tenkō and to acquire a new form of integrity.” Turns out — those idealistic kids he interviewed all became cogs in the capitalist machine. And the tenkō psychology only became stronger when a dazzling economy threw money at anyone willing to go out and buy a nice pair of leather lace-ups.

So, what about our freeters of 2005? Are they going to stay punk rock forever?

According to a 2003 survey, 70% of freeters would happily take a full-time white collar job if offered one. So, they’re not exactly ideological rebels — just simply “unemployable.” This other 30%, however, may be the proto-bohemians that everyone from “Slow Life”-advocates to David Brooks-followers are searching for. But if you’ve ever seen the lifestyle of workers in Japan’s hipster cultural industry, you’ll notice that even without the dark suits and chōrei (朝礼) morning exercises, these “cool kids” have just replicated the work-style and values of the salaryman life within the magazine/music making process: long hours and expectations of total-dedication to the job.

There does seem to be a handful of freeters who are rejecting the tenkō value-conversion, but they are essentially being pushed out of society rather than forcing society to find a business organization that does not demand a total re-formulation of selfhood.

For better or worse, tenkō appears to be a fundamental principle of Japanese psychology, and the perceived need to abandon “selfish” interests for entrance into an adult “human matrix” (Lifton’s term) is built into the social structure. This means that we’re not going to be seeing the Bohemian army any time soon. Welcome back to the Fast Life.