The root of Japan’s malaise
One of the most recent surveys on the Nintendo Wii’s Everybody Votes Channel here asks for your opinion on whether “things that can be put off until tomorrow should be (a) knocked off today; (b) left until tomorrow.”
Japan being, of course, an embodiment of the Protestant work ethic that would have made the Protestant elders come in their pants, and so on and so forth, I’d fully expected the results to show an overwhelming bias toward clearing the national plate each day. If nothing else, to get on a better karmic footing for the late-night weekday drinking which seems to be omnipresent, if not evenly distributed, throughout all strata of Japan’s urban working culture.
But no. The results literally rip out all assumptions about Japan’s unflinching dedication to work by the roots. Fully 63.9% of the Wii-owning populace say that things which can be put off until tomorrow, should be.
Clearly, before any more bleating is done about the socio-economic malaise brought on by the ageing of Japan’s population, these absconders from the corporate front lines must be dragged back to their desks and made to understand how important it is that they not allow this manana culture, this rot, this undue emphasis on not-work, to spread any further. We shall not rest until karoshi is once again a buzzword of the year.
