About 22% of Japanese people work more than 49 hours a week, compared with 16% of US workers and 11% in France and Germany, according to data from the Japanese government. At 35%, South Korea’s workaholics work even more. Erika Sekiguchi spends 14 hours a day at work and gives up many of her paid holidays. But she is not even an extreme example. The 36-year-old trading company employee used eight of her 20 days of paid vacation in 2014, six of which were sick leave. “Nobody else uses their vacation days,” Sekiguchi said. Yuu Wakebe, a health ministry official overseeing policy on working hours, admits that he does 100 hours of overtime a month. He blames the pressure to match the number of hours your colleagues work. “It is a worker’s right to take paid vacations,” Wakebe said. “But unfortunately working in Japan involves quite a lot of volunteer spirit.”
Who says that Japanese workers don’t use their vacation days?
Erika Sekiguchi An old employee of a company Yuu Wakebe A journalist