JAPAN | CULTURE | MENTAL HEALTH

The Dark Side of the Japanese Virtue of “Gaman”

Working in Japan showed me the negative side of this often-praised Japanese cultural idea.

“Gaman.”

Supposedly a Japanese cultural idea that promotes stoicism, perseverance, and endurance of hardship without complaining, in recent years, much like ikigai, it’s been packaged and marketed to the West as a philosophy that will change your life.

For me, I learned about gaman the old-school way — through the school of hard knocks.

I arrived in Tokyo in the autumn of 2016, seconded to headquarters from the Singaporean subsidiary of the Japanese company I was working at. My dream of moving to Japan had finally come true. I knew that adapting to Japan would not be easy. But I had not known the high price I would have to pay.

Living in Japan would be an entire lesson in gaman, but I’m not sure if it did change my life for the better.

Learning to endure endless overtime work

It was 11:30 PM on a weekday night.

The autumn sky had turned dark hours ago, and the office lights had switched off automatically. We were huddled over our computers, hacking away relentlessly on the keyboard, trying to get our numbers on the goddamned Excel sheet to tally.

We had our monthly department meeting tomorrow, and all the product managers had to present the sales performance for the brands that we were each managing.

This was completely mundane. Overtime work was supposed to be normal in Japan.

I had known about all of this before even arriving in Tokyo. It’s a country renowned for excessive overwork. So much so that the term for “death from overwork” — karoshi — has even entered the English language.

But I was naive. Things couldn’t possibly be that bad, right? And from an objective point of view, the overwork situation in Tokyo was improving.

Ever since the suicide of a young woman at Japan’s top advertising agency in 2015, all across Japan, addressing excessive overtime and implementing proper corporate compliance policies became something that Japanese companies appeared to be discovering for the first time.

The country even launched something as laughable as “Premium Friday” — the national campaign urging companies to let staff go home after 3 PM on the last Friday of each month so they could go shopping, drinking, or for a long weekend vacation. (A year later, we soon forgot about the term.)

From the looks of it, my company appeared to be serious about it.

In a bid to force employees to go home, the lights were programmed to turn off automatically after 10 PM. (That’s how bad overtime culture was.) That’s why we couldn’t switch them on again. Some colleagues had resorted to bringing in table lamps to combat the darkness so they could continue working until the last train.

My colleagues were clearly masters of gaman.

But the day had been a long day, and our fatigue was clearly degrading our performance. Fed up with the lack of air conditioning — even in the autumn night it felt suffocating since we couldn’t open the windows either — I rushed to finish the task.

“This is a waste of time,” I complained, knowing that most of what we were doing was pointless.

“The sales trends don’t really change from month to month that dramatically. Do we really need to report this every month? For that, so many of us are staying late to perfect a document that will only be seen for a few minutes before being thrown away. And all this printing is not good for the environment. It’s not logical at all!!”

My colleagues agreed, nodding in the dark, but pointed out that there was nothing they could do for now.

“Shou ga nai yo. We are salarymen, so we just have to do it.”

“What time is the last train? Can we make it?”

“It’s 12:17 AM,” said my colleague Takashi who lived together in the same company dormitory as me. “Let’s go!”

“I nodded and saved the Excel file, and sent it to Misaki who was going to consolidate the disparate files and print them out tomorrow.

The next day, the stacks of A3 paper went around the room of nearly 30 people.

The ritualistic presentation began. Another boring session to get though. Tons of difficult Japanese expressions. But at least, I was finally used to understanding keigo in presentations.

That was my first lesson in the Japanese art of “gaman” and my first taste of overtime — the Japanese style. It was going to be a way of life for the next couple of years.

I was neither in finance nor in consulting. Neither was I a startup founder. It didn’t matter, for the next couple of years, I was going to be working 60 to 70-hour weeks.

Reaching my “gaman” limit

In the winter of 2019, I’d had enough.

I was working so hard that I questioned why I hadn’t joined finance. At least there I would be paid well. The weeks turned into months of attending pointless meetings bombarded by stacks of paper.

I had forgotten why I had moved to Tokyo in the first place. I couldn’t do it anymore.

Constantly anxious, and burned out, my diet steadily devolved into doses of overly sweetened and cheap can coffee dispensed by the vending machine just 20 meters away. Dinners turned into a carb-heavy regimen of ramen or abura soba.

Worse of all, it felt like none of my contributions really mattered. I was just a cog in the massive machine.

“Quitting is an option” — I thought to myself. Don’t be like the poor Japanese girl who took her own life because she tried too hard to endure.

So, I threw in the towel. I would gaman no more.

I expressed my decision to quit, and all hell broke loose.

“FINE. THEN, TELL ME, IN THE TWO YEARS YOU HAVE BEEN HERE, WHAT HAVE YOU CONTRIBUTED? I HAVEN’T SEEN ANY AMAZING CREATIVE CAMPAIGN IDEAS FROM YOU AT ALL!”

The department head was grilling me during the exit interview, and I didn’t know what to say. I was voiceless. I didn’t know what to say. Japanese wasn’t my native language after all, and in emotional situations such as these, I find it hard to speak — regardless the language.

I stammered. “I joined HQ and this division with the mission to help to support the global business, and frankly speaking, I don’t think I’ve really had the opportunity to do that given the circumstances. It’s not fair for you to say that because I never had the support or the resources.”

“YOU SAID JUST TWO MONTHS AGO, YOU WOULD CONTINUE WORKING HERE!” my manager continued to scream at me.

“I WILL REMEMBER YOU AS A VERY BAD BUSINESSPERSON,” he roared at me like Justice herself dispensing judgment.

I was not going to gaman that. A new-found power rose from the depths of my belly, and I stood my ground.

“I’m sorry, but that sounds like “pawa-hara” (power-harassment, a term referring to leaders in positions of authority abusing their power).

Immediately, his tone became friendlier.

“Oh, that’s totally not my intention at all…”

Whatever he said after that didn’t reach me. Nothing he said would sway my decision, and nothing he said was of any further consequence.

There was one good thing that came out of it. I had discovered that I could endure a lot more mental pain than I had even thought possible.

The toxic work culture of corporate Japan taught me how to gaman. But survivor bias tells me that for every person that emerges stronger from ordeals like that, there are others who try too hard to hold on to the frayed threads of their unraveling mental state, often with far more disastrous results .

My life had been changed, not by reading a piece of AI-generated nonsense, but by actually going through corporate hell. Was it changed for the better? I don’t know, but I know I will never be the same again.

If gaman be a virtue, there’s no better place to learn it than at a traditional Japanese company in Japan.

How I “gaman” today and stay sane in Japan

Today, my work is much more manageable. I still work overtime — though currently, the amount is very minimal. I’ve tried to adopt a more middle-ground approach to life in Japan.

Still think gaman is a good thing? Think again.

For me, it’s simple: Gaman if it makes sense, screw it if it doesn’t. In the end, gaman isn’t all that special after all. Prioritizing my mental health is more important than trying to endure what is potentially unendurable and praying that things somehow work out.

I used to wonder why so many Japanese salarymen drink themselves piss-drunk and end up sleeping at train stations.

Now I know. Drinking with your colleagues isn’t just for show — it’s one of the ways Japanese people release steam and vent. Nowadays, from time to time, I gather a group of colleagues — no bosses invited — and just hang out for drinks.

Please note that this is not a recommendation to indulge in alcohol. Drinking should be done in moderation.

And then, there are the things to look forward to on the weekends. Hanging out with friends. Going to onsen resorts. Getting in touch with nature, even if you live in Tokyo, is surprisingly easy.

In the end, it’s important to take the big picture view. Japan’s not for everyone, but it is still a beautiful and pleasant country to live in, as I’ve explored in “Want to Move to Japan? — 6 Questions to Carefully Consider First.”

Finally, writing about my experience of life in Japan helps me stay sane too. That’s precisely why you are reading this piece right now.

Note: Names have been changed in the article.

© Alvin T. 2023

Interested in Japan, Japanese culture, or the Japanese language? Follow me! I write frequently about Japan-related topics on Japonica, where I am also an editor. Discover my most-read stories here.