This is so true. There is also a video on this topic from an australian living in japan with his family. He is shahring a frew anecdotes about this excact issue.
Yeah, I like his channel, but haven't watched his vids in a little while. Thanks for reminding me he exists! I actually found myself missing the life I had in Japan not too long ago, but this guy, and there's another foreign worker who makes
Youtube shorts about being a salaryman in Japan, who reminded me how shitty life is out there.
There's just an extremely pervasive cultural issue where everyone pretends to be busy to appear to be hard-working and diligent, but the reality is that everyone is just faking it, so nobody actually achieves anything, which is really why productivity is so low. They also create loads of random, invented, pointless jobs. For example, at the campus I worked on, you would have one gardener doing some kind of task, and three overseers watching the gardener. Or, if there's some construction going on on the road, they'll have 10+ people on a 10 metre stretch telling you to watch out, and be careful of the construction, and like 3 guys actually doing construction work, with two or three additional guys overseeing the construction workers.
My boss (who is a westerner) really bought into that side of the culture, and would start work at the lab I worked at before 8am, and would stay until 9 or 10pm six days per week, yet, he hadn't performed any experiments for over a decade by the time I joined the lab, and, as far as anyone could tell, he spent his day doing nothing, and generally only tended to publish whenever funding/lab review cycles came around every five years. I think in his head, he felt that if he pretended to be extremely busy, everyone else would work hard. He once told me I don't need to take weekends off, because I don't have any family in Japan, and if he can spend 14+ hours away from his wife and kid (who he seemingly hated) six days per week, I should be willing to do the same. I just walked out of the meeting.
