Let's Salary slaving!

[Taro Toporific]

Salarymen grin and bear wage slavery
The Japan Times: Oct. 5, 2003
The surreal torments of the young Japanese salaryman know no bounds. They would be intolerable without a magic incantation.... Shigoto da kara shikata ga nai (It's work, there's no help for it)....His waking day runs from 6 a.m. to 2:30 a.m. Sales are down, head office is upset. Meetings degenerate into "kangaroo courts." "Salary thieves! Insects!" rage the top dogs. Tsuboi and his fellow salesmen hang their heads. Yes, they sigh, it's their fault, they will try to do better. ("Shigoto da kara . . .")

[AssKissinger]

This article makes me wonder how different I am from the average Joe or average Takahiro or whatever. There's no way I could possibly keep a job like this. It's not that I wouldn't be willing work this much if it was the only way to survive but it's that there is no way I could work those kinds of hours, take shit from my boss and not tell him to fuck-off and get fired. It's happenned to me before so I know I'm telling the truth. I just can't take shit or give my life to a job. Am I abnormal? I'm sure it's the world that's fucked-up if doing nothing but work and being treated like shit is normal. I think I'd rather be homeless than work from 6:30AM-2:00AM. What point could there be to life for someone who works that much? And then I think about people who survived the Russian Gulags for years and years or even the American slaves who lived their whole lives in terrible and unfair conditions I wonder, am I closer to the tender hearted school boy who downs a hundred tylenol because the pretty cheerleader doesn't love him or I am a really a no-shit taking badass like Nat Turner? How much of Solzhenitsyn's Denisovich's spirit do I have? Should I admire these salary men for their will to continue or should I despise them for not having the courage to say no?

[Captain Japan]

This article makes me wonder how different I am from the average Joe or average Takahiro or whatever. There's no way I could possibly keep a job like this.

It's just in how society is wired. This sort of sacrifice is seen as admirable by society at large here in Japan, at least or so it seems to me. Looking at the situation logically (as folks in the west might) doesn't work. (Logic might call into question, for example, the effectiveness of this sort of slavery, which to me is about zero.) Think about it: "otuskare sama" (honorably tired person) is a positive form of goodbye no matter the situation, tired or otherwise. It ain't "take it easy" as western folks might say; being tired is pretty standard stuff.

I really think that if for some reason salarymen weren't allowed to relay in great detail to their friends, co-workers, etc. about how rough they've got it, they wouldn't put up with the job abuse. The "taihens" and "otsukare samas" wouldn't be as frequent and so then would the respect that goes along with doing this ridiculous work.

My office is similar. Guys twiddle their thumbs until 11PM everyday, sometimes redoing the same task 20 times just to "check" it. But I think to them it's gotten to be so normal that they don't think twice about it.

[den4]

thought they had a song back in the US a while back that went like:

"I owe, I owe, so it's off to work I go..." think that'd kind of fit the same thing as salarymen slavery.....

[Neo-Rio]

It's just in how society is wired. This sort of sacrifice is seen as admirable by society at large here in Japan, at least or so it seems to me. Looking at the situation logically (as folks in the west might) doesn't work. (Logic might call into question, for example, the effectiveness of this sort of slavery, which to me is about zero.)

Yeah, this kind of sacrifice is deemed to be honourable. But I understand why.

I was talking to a Japanese company owner the night about a book he was reading. It was some classic Japanese novel about Japan's civil war between Tokugawa Ieyasu and the other shogun who was raising hell at the time. Anyway, during the course of the book, it was clear that Ieyasu was going to kick ass, so a whole pile of warriors on the other side defected to him. Only the most trusted and loyal samurai of the other guy actually went into war with reduced numbers..... and got completely wasted.
To the Japanese man reading it, he talked about how that this kind of loyalty from the samurai - even to death in the face of extreme adversity - was some kind of honorable thing... that they stuck through to the end.

Freud once asked the question "Who benefits from civilisation?".
I mean, in Japan... who is really benefitting from these kinds of noble and "honorable" deeds... of slaving yourself to death? Geez, of course it's honorable for a worker to sacrifice himself.... if you're a modern day shogun and control their loyalty.