Based on a book by former University of Tokyo professor Tsuguya Sakamoto, an article describes young doctors who leave the hospital simply because it’s “5 PM,” even when a patient under their care is in critical condition. When 5channel picked up the story, reactions split between those criticizing young doctors and “Gen Z” for “lacking a sense of responsibility in a job that holds people’s lives in its hands,” and those defending them with arguments like “leaving on time is a basic right” and “Japan’s medical system — which runs on assumed self-sacrifice — is the one that’s actually hit its limit.” The discussion also branched into medical school enrollment quotas and doctors’ pay and working conditions.
Doctors carry the weighty mission of saving patients’ lives. But doctors are only human too — some of them prioritize things like income and working hours. Tsuguya Sakamoto, a former professor at the University of Tokyo’s Health Center who calls himself “a Todai graduate who hates Todai,” worries about the future of Japan’s medical world being dragged down by a “lack of drive to improve.” Excerpted and reconstructed from his book “The Terrifying University of Tokyo Hospital” (Asuka Shinsha). [Part 3 of 3]
Contents
What they prioritize isn’t future research goals, but “pay and working conditions”
Source: moneypost.jp / Original article here
Personal responsibility 🙂
That's your future right there. Karma comes for everyone.
What we need is a second Jichi Medical University (a school that trains doctors for underserved postings), but for the night shift
Doesn't matter, patients will plummet anyway once the population keeps shrinking lol
A vocational school would do just fine too
No way that produces decent adults lol
This country's done for
Japan's own "Little Emperor" syndrome (China's spoiled-only-child phenomenon), huh. But surely they'd heard a thousand times that doctors work brutal hours — so why'd they go into it?
This country has nowhere left to go but downhill
Vicious cycles are showing up everywhere now
Med students back in the bubble era were the same
"Why do you want to be a doctor?"
"'Cuz I wanna be rich, yeah!!"
That's how it was
And the doctors are the ones running them over — in a sturdy German car or a Lexus
Why can't people see that?
Exactly this
It used to hold together somehow through common sense, appearances, and peer pressure
But a generation that never had that "common sense" to begin with was never going to slot neatly into it
They just wanted to prove how smart they are lol
If nursing school were made the hardest program to get into, these guys would go there instead
If one of them ends up on your case, you'd better ask for a swap
"We're the elite, you know"
Just because you drilled exam techniques on your parents' dime doesn't mean your character came out normal!!
Given by whom, exactly? Vietnamese workers?
By generations other than Gen Z
Come on, at least grasp that much, Gen Z kid
It's harsh, but I think if doctors or nurses got emotionally invested in every single patient, they couldn't keep going mentally, and the job would become impossible to sustain
Only people who can switch on and off to some degree, or who run a bit emotionally cold, are cut out for it
It tends to turn into assembly-line work
Patients just want to get better, which is fair enough, but expecting doctors and nurses to also emotionally hold your hand is a separate issue, I think
When I came to in the ICU, I saw a patient who'd just been treated and wheeled in — a whole crowd of doctors and staff working on that one patient. But once it was over, they brought the family in… guess that meant it wasn't going to end well, and it was time for the goodbyes
Given how heavy the responsibility and how brutal the workload is, I'd say they deserve to be paid even more than they are
Alright then, let's raise everyone's insurance premiums!
Basically it's split into day shift and night shift, and one nurse is responsible for multiple patients in rotation
Even if you hit the nurse call button, it's not necessarily your assigned nurse who shows up
It's not like with doctors — a single nurse doesn't stay assigned to one patient all the way through to discharge
So firefighters and soldiers should get to head home partway through a fire or a war too, then?
Even in jobs with less responsibility and lower pay, if you can't get your own work done you end up doing overtime, and if you still can't handle it, you get fired
If a doctor abandons the patient they're responsible for, I'd say that person just isn't cut out for the job
Just get it done properly
What about emergency admissions or a patient's condition suddenly taking a turn for the worse?
Even applications for elite bureaucrat positions are dropping — Japan is definitely getting weaker
Even in government jobs, people who bail at quitting time still get pressured
Because someone else always ends up stuck cleaning up after them
They're getting paid to go stalk someone and call it "overtime," so clearly they've got time to spare
Most of politics is just barbershop chatter anyway
Maybe a lot of people hate it because the pointless internal communication overhead is so high?
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Under work-style reforms, overtime caps have applied to doctors too since April 2024 — a system born out of reflection on a medical field worn down by long hours. But in the article that sparked this discussion, and in the 5ch reactions to it, “leaving on time” tends to get flattened into a matter of individual character or generational griping about “Gen Z,” with little mention of hospital-side structural issues like on-call systems and staffing levels. The doctor shortage also traces back to medical school enrollment caps and uneven distribution across regions, so pinning the blame solely on young doctors’ individual attitudes only tells part of the story. At the same time, how far a doctor should go when a patient’s condition suddenly worsens is a question that involves both individual doctors’ judgment and hospital systems — not one that reduces neatly to black and white.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “👨⚕ “Because it was 5 PM,” young doctor goes home despite a critical patient — young doctors’ “attitude of prioritizing pay and conditions above all”.”
