Tokyo with its extensive public transit system forces you to interact with hundreds if not thousands of Japanese everyday. One of the first observations you make is about Japanese sleeping habits. The Japanese seem to have the ability to sleep anywhere. It’s quite a skill, one that I look at in envy every time I’m on a train. I have this inability to sleep sitting up which drives me crazy because I’d love to able to catch a few zzzz s on my long commute.
However the Japanese aren’t born with a switch that allows them to sleep at the drop of a hat. They have a number of factors that assist them:
A) No crime – When I sit on a train I’m used to being in public in North America I grip my bag with a death grip even though I can’t sleep. This is to prevent a pickpocket or member of the thieves’ guild from slyly grabbing my bag while it is in arms reach. In Japan they don’t give a second thought to throwing their bag in the overhead rack, which on a busy train around 20 people can grab, and then sitting down on the bench and promptly falling asleep.
B) No space – Housing in the big cities of Japan is at a premium. Most families’ living room doubles as someone’s sleeping space or families from a young age all sleep together in one room. This encourages heavy sleep even if there is activity where someone is sleeping. Thus Japanese can sleep through anything.
C) Exhaustion – The two main groups on trains are students and salary men. Students in Japan get the least amount of sleep of students in all developed nations. The national average is under six hours. Then during the day they are generally overworked to the point of exhaustion which encourages them to sleep whenever they can. This continues later in life with salary men, who you see most on a Tokyo train also sleeping because they are so overworked. Which leads to another salary man factor, drinking.
D) Alcohol – It is part of Japanese salary man culture to get wasted as often as possible which of course leads to many people passing out from a combination of the above factors on a train.
If you like this then, you should check out more from the “Myths of Japan” series:
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| Drugs in Japan Myth | Japan’s Gay culture | Divorce a Japanese Tradition | The American Occupation of Okinawa | Myths of Japan |
Gaijinass 
Japanese students ….yes…overworked…too busy doing meaningless bullshit to do any real studying, hence juku and that constant study facade. Oh and then there are clubs…and all the other nonsense they get up to. No wonder they are tired. Oh and the fact that its basically a fucking miracle these days for a Japanese parent to have anything even vaguely resembling a “rule” in the home so 13 year olds stay up literally all night doing whatever they want….parents dont say a damn thing. Then when they are trying to sleep in my class and I “oops” drop kick their desk…its my fault.
I did a study on Hikiko-mori for a research class and yeah the Japanese student really needs crack cocaine or something. My god cram school and rediculous societal expectations. Its no wonder some become Hikiko-mori. Incidentally Hikiko-mori are not the cute emo teens presented in western (as in the watered down, culture specifics removed stuff America gets) manga and anime.
Yes I have been reading, one by one, the posts under the Japan posts tab. I didn’t have the balls to coment till the Manga post. I posted as a guest named potzo and later registered a word press acount only to find potzo already taken.
oy look here see? The thieves’ guild ain’t no cheap pickers to go preyin’ on no sleepin’ geezer, we go big or we go home, Nocturne don’t take kindly to no sleep pickers, y’dig? so quit tryin’ to giv’ us a bad name!
– A concerned “Citizen” yeah citizen, that’s it.