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The story
A “ranking of the world’s full-time working hours,” compiled from OECD data covering the top 15 of 36 member countries with available data, became a hot topic on 5ch’s News Flash+ board. Mexico took first place with a 48-hour work week, and Japan’s name doesn’t appear anywhere on the list. The thread erupted with sarcastic jabs like “low productivity but they still take tons of time off,” met by counterarguments pointing to Japan’s notoriously low rate of paid-leave usage. Some argued that if you counted unpaid overtime (so-called “service overtime”), Japan would effectively top the list, while others questioned the survey methodology itself. An account from a member of Japan’s “Employment Ice Age” generation (survivors of the brutal 1990s–2000s hiring freeze) describing a 140-hour work week also struck a chord.
(details omitted)
Top 15 Countries by Full-Time Weekly Working Hours
Among OECD member countries, the ranking (top 15) based on the 36 countries with available data is as follows.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
So what if Japanese people have low productivity AND take tons of time off?
High productivity plus long hours is the real endgame
Japan's one of the world's worst countries at actually using its paid leave, though
That's exactly why.
If you took weekends and holidays off AND used up all your paid leave,
you'd really barely be working at all —
but how many companies in Japan actually let you do that…
South Korea's average job tenure is 6.6 years, ranking 26th out of 27 OECD countries compared — but 4th-longest annual working hours [11/2] [Capital Region Tiger★]
https://lavender.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/news4plus/1793619212/
What's wrong with that?
Very on-brand for a Japanese worker.
Factor in overtime premiums and that works out to minimum wage or below, honestly.
Even on a monthly salary, you have to convert it to an hourly rate and it still can't fall below minimum wage.
Isn't yours below minimum wage?
Do the math:
Monthly salary ÷ average contracted monthly hours ≧ minimum hourly wage
Things excluded from the monthly salary figure:
overtime pay, commuting allowance, family allowance, dependent allowance,
perfect-attendance/diligence bonuses
Paperwork is actually the highest-productivity work there is, you know?
Respect to the grinders, but still.
Back in the Showa era it was 72 hours a week.
72 hours plus unpaid overtime, plus the occasional all-nighter.
Yeah, exactly.
Our country has this thing called "service overtime" (unpaid overtime that never gets logged as working hours),
so realistically we're probably #1 in the world.
Which is exactly why people keep dying from overwork (karoshi)…
We're falling behind the world in pretty much every other field, so I guess it'd be nice to be #1 at something — even if it's just working hours.
If you don't work now, when will you?
Are you even taking this seriously?
In Japan, the real game is making money without working — that's investing.
Anyone who actually works for a living is a sucker.
Methodologies differ, so take it as a rough reference at best.
There's data like in Re: #27 too.
Writers just cherry-pick whichever numbers are convenient and spin their own narrative.
Japan's actual working hours have dropped a lot these days.
I think it's about on par with Italy now.
Japanese people just don't work as much as they used to.
Hint: more women in the workforce.
Are there even any Japanese workers out there with side jobs? lol
Even the old "Japan used to work long hours" figures probably counted client entertaining and obligatory after-work drinking as work time.
I mean, sure, you could call that "work," but still…
The stats may be sketchy, but going by actual firsthand experience dealing with workers in other developed countries, Japan is still way out ahead on working hours, hands down.
And long vacations are basically nonexistent here.
Japan's long Showa-era working hours were largely because construction made up such a huge share of the workforce,
and long hours were just the norm there.
Round-the-clock rush construction jobs were completely normal back then.
Come on, it's interesting.
The government's telling everyone to live off investments instead of working, and here he is defying the government, betting his whole life on being a corporate slave?
Fine then, let's hear YOUR brag story.
People who actually work are just incompetent lol
About 10% of people are working themselves to the bone, grinding like their life depends on it.
The other 90% do basically nothing and coast along comfortably.
That's the kind of country Japan is.
The social safety net for non-workers is so generous that
Japan might be the only country in the entire world
where households exempt from resident tax (officially "low-income") actually live the most comfortably.
I'd work from 6am to 2am, then sleep 3 hours at the office.
I ate my meals while working.
And even putting in that much, I only made 3 million yen a year.
Looking back, it was insane.
It was an era when a lot of people had mental breakdowns or killed themselves.
Why didn't that push people toward overthrowing the government?
I remember catching a cab around 2am, just blankly staring out the window as we drove along the Shuto Expressway, and tears just started streaming down on their own — I thought, "Ah, I guess I really am exhausted." Brings back memories — it was brutal, but honestly, kind of fun too.
whether side jobs count, that sort of thing.
In America, once household income drops below around 6 million yen a year,
I'd bet a lot of people are working side jobs.
Can't speak for America, but in Japan it's actually the opposite — it's mostly people at pretty major companies who have side jobs.
At small and mid-sized companies, people don't even have the spare capacity for a side gig.
On a project I'm on right now, the guy doing ops is a full-time employee at a massive company, raising kids, AND joining us as a contracted side gig on top of that.
Dude's a physical-stamina monster.
And honestly, having only around 100 days off a year is still totally normal here.
Meanwhile His Majesty the Civil Servant gets 125 days off — more than even Toyota employees.
And on top of that, their daily working hours are shorter than everyone else's too lol
Background and Key Points of This Debate
OECD working-hours statistics are calculated differently from country to country, and rankings can shift dramatically depending on whether only full-time workers are counted, or part-timers and side jobs are included too. Japan dropping off the ranking entirely may partly reflect a falling average as the share of non-regular employment has risen in recent years alongside more women entering the workforce — but there’s also a structural problem: this “average working hours” figure struggles to capture unpaid labor like service overtime, which generates no wages. The thread split over whether to take the statistical ranking at face value as “reality,” or to view it skeptically — citing Japan’s low paid-leave usage and the existence of unpaid overtime as reasons the “numbers don’t match the lived experience.” Some also pointed out that long Showa-era working hours reflected the outsized share of industries like construction at the time, suggesting simple era-to-era comparisons also warrant caution.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Flash+) thread “[World Working Hours Ranking] #1 is “Mexico” at a 48-Hour Week — The World’s Top 15 by “Full-Time Working Hours”.”
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