# Labor in Japan

(This is a response to a reddit thread, which was locked while I was composing
it. Since misinformation about work conditions in Japan is…

* * *

### Labor in Japan

 _(This is a response to_[ _a reddit
thread_](https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/6is6nj/people_are_so_jaded_that_this_is_considered_a/dj91uwh/)
_, which was locked while I was composing it. Since misinformation about work
conditions in Japan is widespread, I’m posting it here. I don’t have any
particular special insight here, other than that I pay attention to news
stories about labor problems in various japanese industries & to how those
issues are covered in japanese media.)_

Japan isn’t doing capitalism “correctly”; if anything, ideas about expected
behavior have caused it to be more warped. Normal white collar office work in
Japan looks a lot like the warped work culture of SV and of the AAA game
industry in the US, with unpaid overtime being extremely common. (This is a
big driver of Karoshi.)

The Japanese media industry relies pretty heavily on exploitative labor
practices, because it’s considered low-status even though it accounts for a
lot of exports.

For instance, comics & fiction typically get serialized in cheap magazines in
a kind of pulp model, where people are signed and paid per chapter but will
lose the ability to continue if they submit chapters late, and the pay rate
isn’t really sustainable for what amounts to 80 hour weeks (which is normal
for weekly manga written & drawn by a single artist).

Live action film and television is also low-status, although I don’t know
about pay or working conditions offhand.

Animators are independent contractors paid by the cut (and required to do
corrections for free, often on a very short deadline — in other words, if they
receive inadequate initial instruction & draw something that doesn’t match the
previous or following scene, they will need to completely redo the animation
for free, and this sometimes happens several times).

The pop music industry in japan is extra exploitative because it has a heavy
focus on girl groups / pop idol acts consisting of minors, with anybody over
the age of 14 or 15 typically getting expelled from a group and replaced; the
big players in this industry take copyright litigation a lot more seriously
than is done in the west, and merchandising and tie-in stuff is done at a much
larger scale, while the artists are considered disposable figureheads.

Sure, Japan has collectivist tendencies which sometimes manifest as thinking
of the greater good. However, more often, those tendencies are warped by
capitalist incentives into tolerating exploitative practices out of a feeling
that this toleration helps one’s immediate peers or family (ex., not doing
free overtime would be screwing over your coworkers, even though these death
marches only exist because everybody does free overtime).

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [June 22,
2017](https://medium.com/p/7b2e7f4b712a).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/labor-in-japan-7b2e7f4b712a)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.