Leisurely Pace of Change : Japanese Workers Learning to Relax

Hiroyuki Kato relaxed on a bench outside an aerial tramway that takes sightseers to the peak of lush, evergreen-forested Mt. Misen on this lovely island shrine, an hour by car and ferry from Hiroshima. Deer wandered nearby, so tame they even begged for food.

With two companions, Kato was savoring one of his seven days of vacation from his home in Fukuoka, on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu. Despite the fact that he has twice as much vacation coming, these seven days are the only time off he expects to take this year. On the other hand, it’s seven more days than he took all last year.

“It’s very difficult to take time off,” he said. “You need a good reason, like being sick.”

Kato, 36, works in a shop selling prescription glasses, and only big companies provide paid sick days. Workers at small firms have to charge them against vacation.

The only way he and his young friends, Keiko Otsuka and Hiroko Nakayama--who work, respectively, in a department store and a bank--were able to get the week off to tour the magnificent, island-dotted Inland Sea was by forgoing time off during the so-called golden week. That’s a period from April 29 to May 5, when a group of national holidays often serves as the basis for a brief getaway.

The Old and the New

Otsuka said she had been able to take only four of the 14 vacation days to which she was entitled last year, and Nakayama said that she, like Kato, hadn’t taken any personal days off.

The three are typical of both the old Japan and the emerging new one. Still content with far less actual vacation time than their counterparts in the West, many Japanese, particularly the younger ones, are beginning to seek more leisure time and to use the vacation days that have been allocated to them.

As a result, they are traveling more, both within their country and abroad, and the well entrenched idea that a long vacation is three or four days is showing signs of changing. Eight- and nine-day trips are becoming more popular. Opinion polls have shown that workers would like to take even longer periods off, if only their employers and fellow workers would stop frowning on long absences.

The issue of time off in Japan has some international overtones. In almost comic opera fashion, it has become a small piece in the trade dispute between this country and the United States.

While U.S. leaders exhort the American work force to buckle down, to stop such practices as reporting sick on Fridays and Mondays and thus gain ground competitively with their Asian rivals, Japanese businesses at the behest of their government are supposed to shorten work weeks and promote more leisure. It’s part of the campaign to somehow ease the overwhelming trade surplus that Japan enjoys with America and most of the rest of the world.

Won’t Lead the Way

(The effort might have more force if the government itself would begin closing on Saturdays, which it has no plans to do.)

As happened in the United States, the long process of change is being led by the major corporations, which began about a decade ago to eliminate Saturday work in the factories.

Bunzo Suzuki, an official of Mazda Motor, the auto producer, recalls that when it first happened, “some wives were upset. They didn’t know what to do with their husbands around for two days.”

Kenichi Yamamoto, president of Mazda, said he has discussed how to shorten working time with the head of the union representing the company’s workers and how to help families learn to use the leisure time.

“Corporate culture is changing, particularly among the young,” he said. “They are anxious to develop their own capabilities and work for their own wants. It will create some new headaches for management.”

Some, maybe, but U.S. managers will hardly sympathize. Even without overtime, the average Mazda work year is about 20 days longer than that of U.S. auto companies--almost a month of extra workdays that the Japanese company gets without paying premium overtime pay. On top of that, even on the production line, few workers take their full vacations.

Moreover, it’s common for office workers to punch out on the time clock to comply with government limits on overtime and then return to their desks for a few more hours--gratis.

The problem is that, despite the rules and supposedly liberal company policies on overtime and time off, there’s overwhelming social pressure to stay on the job.

Shunji Kato, a managing director of the Japan Diners Club card system, is entitled to 20 days of vacation annually but invariably gives up 17 of them. Junior executives take as much as a week off, he says, but most fear that their bosses will look askance at anything more and may even penalize them at semiannual bonus time. (All Japanese workers are paid bonuses as well as salaries.)

With government encouragement, some major firms have begun enforcing vacation periods by closing for golden week, for a week in August and for four or five days before and after New Year’s. This by itself is giving Japanese families time for their first taste of extended travel and travel industry statistics show it.

More than 4.6 million Japanese citizens took overseas vacations last year, for example, a gain of 10% in a year and 2 1/2 times the number of foreign tourists who visited Japan. Trips to Hawaii, one of the most popular destinations, numbered more than 800,000, a 25% jump in five years.

Moreover, while the typical trip used to be in a tour group staying just four days, many travelers now split off from the tour and stay three or four days more, according to Takashi Kitamura, spokesman for the Japan Travel Bureau, Japan’s largest travel organization.

Gaining Popularity

“They used to want to go where everyone else was going,” Kitamura said, “but recently they want something more individual--they want to go where no one else is going.” Hence, the outer islands in Hawaii are capturing many of those who previously might have gone just to Waikiki. So are Tahiti and Fiji.

“Gradually, the eight- and nine-day tour is becoming more popular. But a 14-day tour? Hardly anyone takes such a trip,” Kitamura said.

However, spending by Japanese tourists is legendary. According to figures compiled by the Hawaii Visitors Bureau, typical Japanese visitors spend $236 a day during their stay, compared to $86 for the average non-Japanese. In large part, this reflects a custom of showering gifts on friends and relations back home, many of whom made gifts of cash as a pre-trip send-off.

Tourism is still dominated by the younger generation, but Kitamura observed that many “silver-aged” people, limited previously by the lower incomes of the past and by their desire to spend first on such necessities as refrigerators and cars, are now joining in the fun. For them, trips to places with some cultural meaning to them, particularly China, are becoming popular.

All of this growth is quite apart from the ubiquitous school tours that transport children and teen-agers on overnight jaunts to places of interest, such as Peace Memorial Park, the epicenter of the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima, or Miyajima Island, with its much photographed red Shinto gate sitting in tidewaters just offshore and its 1,100-year-old shrine.

On one recent day, hundreds of children poured off the ferries, shouting “Hello!” to show off their English when they encountered American tourists and filling the narrow streets of the town.

Groups of senior citizens, the men almost always in suit and tie, followed other tour leaders to the Itsukushima shrine, where they strolled on boardwalks, built above high tide waters, that link the brilliant red buildings of the shrine and its simple main altar.

On the ferry headed home, an elderly gentleman in a business suit with two companions struck up a conversation with two Americans, displaying the English he uses on frequent trips to Irvine and other U.S. cities. Shigeru Yasuda is a managing director of Kumahira Safe, which he says has about 10% of the American market, in Hiroshima.

When was his last vacation? “I never take vacation.”

What about this outing to Miyajima? “This is business,” he said. “I’m entertaining a guest.”