As the COVID-19 virus (novel coronavirus) spreads, the world’s governments are wrestling with how to respond. In Japan, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has called for schools to shuts their doors until late March in an effort to contain the virus. That announcement has left many Japanese parents wondering how they’ll cope. Because, despite what some English language media would have you believe, guaranteed sick days in Japan aren’t a thing.
No National Sick Day Program…
Recently on Twitter, the progressive consumer advocacy group Public Citizen tried to make a case that the US should institute a national guaranteed sick leave policy. To make its point, it listed the “developed nations around the world” that had guaranteed sick leave.
The group received comments from citizens of several nations that their numbers were not accurate. I also took the group to task for its contention that Japan has a “guaranteed sick leave” policy. (Readers are welcome to read the Twitter thread below with feedback from many people with experience working in Japan. At publication time, Public Citizen has still not responded to people questioning its statistics.)
The fact is that, not only is there no such national policy, but many companies in Japan don’t even offer “sick days.” Companies generally grant a time off package from which workers need to take both vacation and sick leave.
As a labor lawyer Asano Hideyuki ( 浅野英之) explains on his Web site, Japan has two legal designations for time off. The first is paid personal leave, or 有給休暇 (yuukyuu kyuuka). Anything separate from that – including sick leave – is legally considered 特別休暇 (tokubetsu kyuuka), or “special leave”. This leave is considered “special”, explains Asano, because it’s established through a contract between an employee and their employer[1].
Indeed, this lack of legalized sick leave can be an impediment to recruiting corporate foreign workers. As an article on the site Job Search Japan explains[2], many Europeans are accustomed to receiving sick time separately from their paid vacation and are “shocked” that Japanese companies typically don’t follow suit.
…And an Anti-Vacation Culture
But it gets worse for Japanese workers. According to recent surveys, most of them don’t feel they can take the paid vacation they’ve been allotted.
For several years now, Expedia Japan has conducted a multi-country survey asking workers about their paid vacation time. The most recent survey was in 2018 and it covered 19 countries. As the headline makes clear, Japanese workers lead the world as some of the worst vacation-takers on the planet[3].
Japanese workers, says Expedia Japan’s survey, take only 50% of their allotted vacation days – the lowest percentage among the 19 countries surveyed. Not surprisingly, 58% of Japanese workers also say they feel guilty taking vacation days. Japan also has the fewest percentage of workers who feel they can take a long vacation: only 20% surveyed said they have taken a prolonged leave of absence.
On the flip side, Expedia Japan said that only 53% of people surveyed said they felt like they don’t get enough rest time. That’s on the lower end of world rankings. However, when the company broke that out by age bracket, they found that primarily older workers age 50 and up (40%) were skewing that number downwards. These are workers raised during Japan’s “Showa boom” who are accustomed to working longer hours (and not complaining about it). By contrast, 63% of workers age 18 to 34, and 61% of workers age 35 to 49, say they don’t get enough time off.
These low rates aren’t due to some sort of mythical “samurai spirit” or ethic of industriousness that’s peculiar to Japan. When surveyed why they didn’t take vacation, many said it was because their companies were short-handed. Others said that there were emergencies to tend to. Meanwhile, the third-largest group said that they didn’t want people to think they were lazy. In other words, many feel a generalized social pressure that prevents them from taking time off.
Additionally, many companies simply bully workers into not taking vacation. Both Japanese citizens and foreigners working in Japan report feeling pressured to come into work when sick. Many also feel pressured not to take their allotted time. Unfortunately, despite Japan’s vaunted “work reform” programs, its overwork culture doesn’t appear to be changing.
Japan’s Coming Vacation Apocalypse
Japan’s anti-vacation culture is posing a special challenge in the wake of the country’s coronavirus-driven school closings.
In order to combat the spread of the COVID-19 virus, PM Abe has asked elementary, middle and high schools across Japan to shut down from March 2nd (JST) until late March. (The government contends it doesn’t have the power to order schools to close.) While some schools are refusing to shut their doors, most are ceding to the request.
Parents in Japan are expressing confusion and anger over the announcement. Many are trying to figure out what to do with younger children who shouldn’t left home alone. Fortunately, some companies are allowing desk employees to work from home during the crisis. Others, however, are obstinately insisting workers commute into the office.
The confusion has left local cities scrambling to find ways to support its citizens. Some cities, like Fujinomiya, will allow parents to deposit their kids at school under adult supervision. Unfortunately, that seems to cancel out any benefit of a school closure[4].
For its part, the Abe government has pledged financial support to parents who need to find care for their kids. That has many asking: why keep kids home if parents have to go to work anyway?
If workers in Japan indeed had guaranteed sick leave, then parents who couldn’t leave their kids alone could take this time off. As it stands, the Abe government will need to do some fast thinking around how to support working parents through this crisis. Perhaps, at the end of this, the country will have a healthy discussion about a saner approach to sick leave.
Frankly, I wish Americans would have that discussion as well.
Sources
[1] 特別休暇って、年休（有給休暇）とどう違うの？Roudou-Bengoshi.com
[2] 日本企業で働きたい外国人が感じる不安（休暇編）. NSAsia
[3] 【世界19ヶ国 有給休暇・国際比較調査2018】 日本の有休取得率、有休取得日数、ともに世界最下位 「有給休暇の取得に罪悪感がある」と考える日本人は世界最多！ Expedia
[4] Link no longer active
