Big news from Reuters on Friday: “Sleepy Workers Costing Billions”. According to this headline-making story, workers “struggling to stay awake on the job are causing Japan economic losses of some $30 billion a year.”

Now, aside from the dubious nature of the study (3075 workers at a chemical company were surveyed regarding their sleeping habits for a month - yes, the article “a”, denoting one company and one month, is used), I can tell you that from anyone actually living in Tokyo, the response is probably a yawn and a jaded “…ya think…??!?” During even the most cursory visit to Tokyo you will be amazed to see people sleeping everywhere. I took the picture (above) with my cellphone on a weekday at 5 pm – I just couldn’t believe how utterly passed out the guy on the left was.

Now, before you email me and tell me that the guy probably stayed up all night, or worked hard all week, or whatever blah blah blah, let me assure you that this scene is typical, typical, typical for any subway ride any time of the day. I am sure he is a tired guy, but what’s everybody else’s excuse?

YES, long hours at the office (I purposely am not calling them “working hours”); YES, long commutes for everyone from the suburbs mean getting up early (in my completely unscientific and random survey of the hundreds of Japanese employees I work with each year, I’d say the average wake up time is 6 am); YES, getting home late from the return commute; and YES, a nation focussed on “productivity” means you have to be “doing something” all the time in order to belong (as an aside, hence the inability for many Japanese people to understand Livedoor as a company/as a business model: they didn’t “produce” anything, they just “manipulated the system”).

At the same time, however, people seem to be sleeping everywhere in the middle of the day (movie theatres, parks, cafes, subways, and trains) and there are magazines dedicated to salesmen (using “men” deliberately there) that contain articles about the best places to go and kill time (and nap?) while on the job (cafes, manga cafes, etc.). One other thing to note is that Japan is the world’s third largest coffee importer (not to mention the amount of caffeinated tea conusmed), so you get the lovely visual paradox of people napping in the middle of the day at Starbucks with a coffee cup in front of them.

I don’t know…I can’t figure it out…still amuses me though after all these years, AND, what is even MORE amusing is that the passed out guy in the photo above (and every other sleeper on the trains) has some kind of internal signal that will rouse him from his slumber at precisely the right station – there’s NO way he’ll miss his stop!