Japanese business men may have a stereotypical image that they never take paid holiday (which may not be completely wrong!!), but such a tendency becomes more and more real recently… Today I would like to introduce an article, which wrote about typical way of Japanese business men to spend paid holiday.
It may be very common to go to beautiful blue beach by taking paid holiday overseas, but it is not always the case here in Japan. According to a research, conducted by a labour policy research organization, only average of 51.6% Japanese business men took paid holiday in FY 2009 while the value was 61.3% 30 years ago. In other words, the value has been dropped by 10%.
But why is it so hard to take paid holiday, you think? Well, it seems people are worried as your colleagues will be busier if you book a hol, and you are also likely to be unbelievably busier before and after your holiday… Sometimes, your company may not strongly (or positively) encourage you to take paid holiday at all…
So, question here is that how those lucky people who somehow managed to take paid holiday spend their precious offs?? To see the trend, the article conducted an survey, targeting 25 to 34 year old male business men live in Tokyo, Aichi and Osaka (multiple answers allowed!). As a result, 48.5% answered that they will sleep as much as they want. Well, as 1 in 2 answered so, you can see how tired people are…
"Gokurakuzukan" some rights reserved. flickr
And the rest were as follows; little trip 36.4%; tv/gaming/ reading/ net surfing 35.6%; shopping 25.8%; going to some events including theme park and concert 18.9％; dating 18.2%; general house work such as cleaning and washing 15.2%.
"kminiatures" some rights reserved. flickr
Well, all of them sound like pretty much something you can do on normal weekend, don’t they…? (-_-;)
Interestingly, the way to spend holiday shows a little variation depending on area; top answer of Aichi was ‘plan a little trip’ (50%) while 70% in Osaka just spend a day to sleep and it seems less people go out. Also, top answer in Tokyo was ‘to sleep’, but the percentage was slightly smaller than Osaka, which was 40%+.
Well, you may fins us lazy as we sound like we just wasting precious offs by sleeping all day long, but I understand… as spending all paid holiday you are entitled to, is still not very common in Japan and you are likely to spend most of it just one by one!
What do you think about today’s article?
I’m looking forward to hearing from those long holiday supporters and those have to sleep just like us!
Source: web R25
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