Explore everyday life in Japan
I'm sure many of you have heard stories about the work culture in Japan, about people working past exhaustion to death, about people working hours and hours of overtime, about the peer pressure that keeps businessmen and women in the office and teachers at schools well into the night even though they have finished their work for the day. Well, I can tell you that most of what you have heard is probably true.
Six day work weeks are very common in Japan, and when you factor in commuting time, many people leave the house before seven o'clock in the morning to go to work and don't return home until after eight or nine o'clock at night. Sundays, though, for those who do not work in the service industry at least, are generally days off. This means that Sundays are fun days in Japan. They are outing days, days when children can spend time with their fathers, who more often than not are the breadwinners in Japan, meaning that they tend to spend more time out of the home than in it.
Sundays are days when the parks and play centers fill up. They are days when going to the aquarium means looking over shoulders, past heads, and between shoulders in the hopes of glimpsing the fish that you came to see. They are days spent in cars, watching DVDs as you wait in traffic with other families who are all trying to go to the same destination. They are days where getting lunch at a nearby restaurant sometimes means waiting for longer than the time it takes to eat. They are days when excited, active children run around and their overworked, exhausted parents do their best to keep up.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting daily updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.