Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, is known as an inveterate workhorse. She often skips social gatherings and has openly rejected the idea of work-life balance. But even by Ms. Takaichi’s standards, it was surprising when she emerged from her Tokyo residence shortly after 3 a.m. on a recent day to convene a meeting with aides ahead of an appearance before Parliament. Ms. Takaichi has drawn criticism for holding the meeting, which took place on Friday and has become known in the Japanese news media as the “3 a.m. study session.” The issue is especially sensitive in Japan, where there have been high-profile cases in recent years of karoshi, or “death from overwork.”
Some argue that the meeting, which involved several aides and lasted about three hours, would feed into unhealthy extremes. Others said that Ms. Takaichi was placing unnecessary burdens on her staff. Yoshihiko Noda, a former prime minister who leads the main opposition party, called Ms. Takaichi’s decision to hold the meeting “crazy.” When he was Japan’s leader from 2011 to 2012, he would start work around 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. “It’s fine for her to work, but she should not be getting other people involved,” he said in an interview. “Everyone is in bed at that time of day. It’s a very sad attitude for the top leader of the country to show.”
huh, faxes? got me curious and:
according to the source, 90% of government offices still require faxed documents, interesting.
i dunno the veracity tho, as the article goes into other reasons but speaks to less concrete things like “tradition” and “rigidity” and felt a bit orientalist… anyway i think the hypothesis that technological limits of the day against the complexity of kanji is an interesting reason of their adoption to think on.
source