Salaryman
Directed by Michael Robert Lawrence (2021, Japan/Canada, 89 minutes), available on Amazon Prime
Japan’s work culture is famous—or infamous. It is a system where employees dedicate their lives to their companies, often at the expense of everything else. Salaryman shows this in brutal detail, following exhausted workers through their daily routines and documenting the effects of a life spent in the office. It is an interesting documentary, though not particularly surprising. If you already know that Japan’s corporate world demands long hours, strict hierarchy, and blind obedience, then this film mostly confirms what you expect. But it does a good job of showing just how deeply ingrained this system is, and how little it has changed despite years of supposed reforms.
The salaryman is a well-known figure: a man in a cheap suit, half-dead from overwork, stumbling into a bar at the end of the day, only to drink himself into oblivion before crawling home. Some people find the sight of them lying passed out on the pavement funny. I find it depressing. These men are supposed to be respectable. They have jobs, salaries, careers. And yet, they live like this because it is the only escape they are allowed. They work themselves to exhaustion, then drink themselves into a stupor to cope. There is something deeply wrong with a society where this is normal.
It wasn’t always this way. After 1945, Japan was in ruins. It needed a disciplined workforce to rebuild itself, and it got one. Hard work and self-sacrifice made Japan into an economic superpower. But what made sense in the 1950s and 60s no longer makes sense now. The country is no longer growing the way it once did. And yet, the expectation remains that workers should devote themselves entirely to their companies, often at the cost of their own happiness. Creativity and originality are discouraged. What matters is obedience—turning up early, staying late, and enduring. It is no surprise that many young Japanese people do not want to follow this path.
China has something similar, though the mentality is different. In China, there is at least an emphasis on ambition and success. People want to get rich, and they will work hard to do it. Japan’s corporate world, in contrast, is about loyalty. A salaryman does not work for himself; he works for the company. There is no higher goal, no sense of personal advancement beyond climbing the ranks of an organisation that ultimately owns him.
The worst thing is that this kind of corporate culture is spreading. Even in England, people are working longer hours, checking emails outside work, and accepting that their lives should revolve around their jobs. This is not the ethical standard that England once stood for. The best thing about England is its tradition of individuality—of seeing work as just one part of life, not the whole thing. The whole point of earning money is to be free to enjoy life, not to be trapped in an office or other place of work for the sake of it.
There is an alternative, and it is one that both the Greeks and John Stuart Mill understood. The Greeks believed in balance—a life where work, learning, and leisure existed in the right proportions. A man was not supposed to dedicate himself to a single pursuit at the expense of everything else. He was supposed to develop himself in multiple ways—physically, intellectually, and spiritually. This is why the Greeks admired men who combined practical skill with philosophy, athleticism with art. Their idea of a good life was one where everything had its place, where no single duty or responsibility was allowed to consume a man entirely.
John Stuart Mill argued something similar but took it even further. He believed that individuality and self-cultivation were the highest ideals of life. A person should not simply exist to work; he should develop his own interests, his own talents, and his own way of thinking. The worst thing a society can do is crush individuality by forcing everyone into the same rigid mould. This is exactly what Japan’s work culture does. It takes people and turns them into identical, obedient drones, trained to endure rather than to think or create.
The best career is one that allows for self-employment—work that gives freedom rather than taking it away. Modern technology is making this easier than ever. People can run businesses online, work remotely, and avoid wasting their lives in offices. The idea of spending forty years in the same company, working overtime to impress a boss, should have died out long ago. Instead, too many people still accept it as normal.
Salaryman is worth watching, but it is more of a warning than anything else. Japan is an impressive country, but its work culture is impressive in the wrong way. The Greeks would have hated it. John Stuart Mill would have despised it. And so should we.
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