Prime Minister Takaichi’s recent social media posts flaunting her "zero to three hours of sleep" and busy domestic chores have drawn cold stares both domestically and internationally. The UK's Independent cynically reported, "Japan PM’s latest attempt to emulate Margaret Thatcher triggers cross-party backlash." Thatcher, whom Takaichi idolizes, was famously known for sleeping only four hours a night. Biographies note that even during her premiership, she cooked for Downing Street staff, prepared her husband's breakfast, and did the ironing. It has been pointed out that Takaichi's sudden tweet was a calculated performance with exactly this in mind.
Looking back to October 2025, during her inaugural speech as LDP president, Takaichi declared: "I will have everyone work like draft horses. I myself am throwing away the term 'work-life balance.' I will work, work, work, work, and work." This statement made huge waves in the media, even winning the grand prize for the 2025 Buzzword of the Year, but it didn't end as mere rhetoric. This slogan completely reversed the direction of the nation's labor policy. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare had originally been preparing an amendment to the Labor Standards Act for the 2026 ordinary Diet session aimed at correcting long working hours. This included a ban on working 14 or more consecutive days and a "working interval system" mandating at least 11 hours of rest between shifts. Following her appointment, however, the submission of these bills was shelved and effectively put on ice.
While demanding that the public discard work-life balance and work like draft horses, what about the Prime Minister's own work ethic? Her attendance at the budget committees of both houses during the extraordinary Diet session was strikingly low. While the average attendance time for prime ministers in intensive deliberations over the past five years was 68 hours, Takaichi clocked in at a mere 33 hours, exactly half. Fleeing from the Diet, the most crucial arena for democratic accountability, only to brag about "not sleeping" due to household chores and reading documents at home, is nothing short of farcical.
I am not criticizing the Prime Minister by demanding she "work more." Quite the opposite. I am adamantly opposed to this archaic "guts-over-brains" mentality that demands everyone scrap their work-life balance and toil like beasts of burden. Historically, Japan has harbored a toxic habit of overvaluing the sheer amount of hardship endured in a process rather than objective results, often making the suffering itself the goal and romanticizing it.
In his analysis of Yukichi Fukuzawa(福沢諭吉)'s philosophy, the eminent political scientist and intellectual historian Masao Maruyama(丸山眞男) used the term wakudeki (惑obsession/溺fixation) to describe a state where specific customs or behavioral patterns become independent of human agency, fixate themselves, and end up dominating the people. This stems from a distrust of logical, rational systems and an over-reliance on subjective spiritualism, such as relying on "raw feelings" or "pain." When this wakudeki takes deep root in society, objective accountability for results vanishes, allowing irrational spiritualism and the absurdities of the status quo to persist. This forms what Maruyama called the "system of irresponsibility (無責任の体系)*1." Emotional appeals like, "Look how much I'm suffering without sleep," are nothing more than self-indulgent get-out-of-jail-free cards designed to deflect responsibility for policy failures.
*1: A concept proposed by Masao Maruyama. It refers to a structural flaw in the decision-making of organizations or nations where the true locus of responsibility and decision-making authority becomes ambiguous, allowing things to proceed without anyone taking accountability.
Under this "system of irresponsibility," the real-world hardships of the people are brushed aside. Right now, what voters expect most from the Prime Minister are measures to combat inflation. Yet, what she enthusiastically pushed through this Diet session was the creation of a new penal code establishing imprisonment for damaging the Japanese flag, along with a profoundly misogynistic revision to the Imperial House Law--granting succession rights to a male heir 38 degrees of consanguinity away via adoption, blatantly ignoring the Emperor's own first-degree daughter. Meanwhile, the yen, which stood at 140 to the dollar when she took office, has plummeted to 163. Naturally, in a country that relies on imports for everything from food to energy, prices have skyrocketed. Furthermore, Japan's GDP per capita by purchasing power parity, which ranked 6th globally in the 1990s, 39th in 2025, and is projected to plunge to 43rd in 2026.
Prime Minister Takaichi and her fanatical supporters might genuinely believe that if we just sacrifice our sleep and work recklessly, the nation will become rich again. However, the biggest reason Japan climbed to become the world's second-largest economy was not because of "モーレツ社員(corporate warriors)*2," nor because people chugged Regain energy drinks to "24時間戦えますか(fight for 24 hours)*3." It was a geopolitical bonus, during the Cold War, the United States heavily favored Japan as a staunch bulwark against communism. The foundational global context is entirely different now. Imitating only the superficial aspects of that era's success story–namely, the sweat and suffering–and forcing the Japanese people to work like draft horses will yield zero reproducible economic growth. The only thing with any reproducibility is the triggering of karoshi(過労死)*4, a tragic phenomenon from the late 1980s that notoriously made its way into the English dictionary.
*2: Moretsu shain: A term for the fiercely dedicated corporate salarymen symbolizing Japan's period of rapid economic growth, who prioritized company work over their families and private lives, willingly enduring long hours and self-sacrifice.
*3: A social phenomenon sparked by a 1988 TV commercial for an energy drink with the catchy slogan "Yellow and black are the signs of courage, can you fight for 24 hours?♪"
*4: Karoshi is a Japanese word meaning death from overwork.
It is a rock-solid, medically proven fact, backed by countless experiments and large-scale studies, that sleep deprivation leads to impaired concentration, a weakened immune system, and an increased risk of lifestyle-related diseases. If so, what the Prime Minister of a nation should be recommending to her people is not some insomniac spiritualism, but rather "logical, efficient systems" and "getting plenty of rest."
