Japanese Government to Its People: Work Less. Be Happy.

For years, the Japanese government has been urging employers to give their workers more time off. Now it is taking its own admonition to heart.

Beginning in January, government offices started closing two Saturdays a month as a first step toward adopting the five-day week.

And this month, in the biggest step Japan has taken toward a shorter work week, all financial institutions, including the Tokyo Stock Exchange, eliminated Saturday operations altogether.

One bank, Sanwa, added a festive note: It marked the occasion with a concert by the bank choir, directed by the bank president. Another, Sumitomo, gave pedometers to its 17,000 employees and urged them to use the extra day off in pursuit of better health. It also opened its medical facilities on Saturdays and offers physical checkups.

Previously, government offices had been open for business on Saturday mornings; banks, insurance companies, brokerages, the stock market and banking facilities at post offices had closed for only two Saturdays a month.

Time for Sports, Hobbies

Bureaucrats such as Takeshi Anezaki, a Labor Ministry specialist whose job is promoting shorter working hours, will now have a chance to try out what they have been advocating.

Anezaki confessed that he has no hobbies and used to spend his one day off a week just lolling around home. With the two-day weekend, he said, he will “try something different, perhaps sports.”

The Labor Ministry thinks that the same thing will happen throughout Japan.

By 1992, the government hopes to reduce working hours from an average of 2,111 a year to 1,800--even lower than the U.S. average of 1,900.

If the goal is achieved, the Labor Ministry predicts, the increased leisure activity will expand consumer demand by $67 billion a year and create 790,000 new jobs.

Surveys show that most workers who have just one day off a week spend it at home. But with two days off, they are likely to eat out, go shopping or for a drive or get involved in sports or hobbies--and spend money in the process.

Both the government and the financial community had for years opposed any reduction in working hours out of fear that the public would complain about reduced services. To forestall such complaints, the government is maintaining essential services--hospitals, for example--and the banks have automated tellers that function on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

So far, complaints have been minimal, and the two moves are expected do more than anything tried so far to encourage others to follow.

But no one expects it to be easy. Even though workers at financial institutions now have a two-day weekend, their work week has not been shortened. The hours for customers remain the same, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., but 40 minutes have been added to the work day to compensate for the three hours employees used to put in on Saturday.

‘Rude to Customers’

Isamu Miyazaki, a former vice minister of the Economic Planning Agency, complained recently that three years ago “businessmen insisted they couldn’t reduce working hours because it would raise labor costs in the middle of a recession.”

Now, he said, Japan is looking forward to a third straight year of 5% real growth under an economy fueled by demand at home, but “employers are saying they can’t cut working hours because they are swamped with orders.”

Miyazaki, now head of the Daiwa Securities Research Institute, said the employers insist that it would be “rude to our customers” to scale back the work week.

“It seems Japan can’t reduce working hours in either recession or boom,” he said.

In the early 1970s, some companies started giving their employees two days off a week, but only once or twice a month. After the shock in 1973-74 of sharply higher oil prices, working hours again began to lengthen.

Today, only 7.3% of enterprises that employ more than 30 persons have a five-day week every week. Labor Ministry statistics show that only 28.5% of workers in enterprises of that size have it; 49% get two days off once, twice or three times a month, and 21.5% work a six-day week consistently. The remaining 1% have a variety of schedules.

Average work schedules are much longer than the official statistics indicate, however. Unlike many Western nations, which count the hours for which workers are paid, including vacation time, Japanese statistics reflect only actual time on the job.

In addition, nearly half the labor force is employed at places with fewer than 30 employees, and no statistics are kept on them, according to the Labor Ministry. Workers at most of these small shops and offices still put in a work week of at least six days.

“For people like us, who work at an enterprise with fewer than 10 employees, two days off every week . . . looks like another world,” a worker at a tiny welding shop said. “If we took Saturdays off, that would mean a cut in pay. We can only envy those who have the five-day week.”

Last year, in the first revision of the Labor Standards Law since 1947--when a 48-hour week was made the legal limit--the government set a goal of 40 hours but specified no deadline.

Gradualness Is Hallmark

Largely in consideration of smaller firms, the implementation is planned in gradual stages, and, for the moment, exhortation is the main weapon. The Labor Ministry has started running television commercials promoting shorter working hours and longer vacations.

Indeed, gradualness has been the hallmark of the slow crawl toward the five-day week: It took the financial institutions 17 years from the time they started talking about it. And the school system, which indoctrinates Japanese to long working hours, has not even started talking seriously about it.

Students are still on a schedule of 210 days a year, compared to the American average of 180 days.

WORK HOURS: A COMPARISON 1987 real annual working hours* of production workers in manufacturing industries. Japan: 2,150 United States: 1,950 United Kingdom: 1,934 West Germany: 1,633

*Working hours stipulated in labor contracts minus vacation and absent days plus overtime hours.

Source: Japan Council of Metal Workers