Japan wants to cut off its workaholics, and America could learn a thing or two from the proposal.
A measure slated to come before Japan’s parliament sometime in the next four months will require workers to use at least five of their 10 guaranteed paid vacation days per year. The United States, where many employees leave vacation days unused or don’t have any at all, might do well to craft a similar model for its workers, even if Americans’ reasons for ignoring paid time off are quite different from those of Japanese wage earners.
Overworking is a chronic problem in Japan. In the 1990s, the term for sudden death caused by exhaustion and overwork became a household name: karoshi.
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Motoatsu Sakurai, president of the nonprofit Japan Society and a former Japanese ambassador to the U.S., likens this proposed social engineering to some affirmative action policies in the States. He said that setting quotas for the number of racial minorities and women admitted to colleges or hired at companies makes institutions see, and ultimately depend on, the benefits of diversity.
“It helps eliminate these kinds of extreme cases of social issues,” Sakurai told HuffPost. “For Japan, when people get used to it, nobody will want to have less holidays.”
