Quirky Japan Chronicles – Episode 11: Sleeping at Work Is Encouraged

By Yosi Written during my lunch break, which I am spending awake, like an idiot.

Introduction: I Have Been Doing This Wrong for Thirty-Seven Years

My name is Yosi. I am 58 years old. I manage a satoyama woodland. I wake up at five in the morning. I go to bed at nine. I have, in thirty-seven years of professional life, never once fallen asleep at work.

I have just learned that this makes me an underperformer.

My daughter — the one who gave me the gacha game, who I am beginning to suspect does not have my best interests at heart — sent me an article last week. The article explained that in Japan, falling asleep at the workplace is not only tolerated but, in many professional contexts, actively respected. It has a name: inemuri (居眠り). It translates, approximately, as “sleeping while present.”

I read this article three times. I forwarded it to my son, who works in logistics. He said: “Yes, Papa. Everyone knows this.” I asked why nobody told me. He said he assumed I knew. I asked why he assumed I knew. He said he didn’t know.

This is a conversation that did not resolve anything, which is a family tradition.

I am 58 years old and I have been commuting to a woodland at five in the morning and staying awake the entire time and apparently this is not what successful Japanese professionals do and I would like those thirty-seven years back please.

Part One: What Is Inemuri, and Why Does It Exist, and Why Does It Make Complete Sense Once You Think About It For Ten Seconds

Inemuri is the practice of sleeping — or appearing to sleep — in public and professional settings. On trains. In meetings. At desks. Occasionally, by all accounts, standing up, which is either deeply impressive or a medical situation, and the line between them is apparently thinner than I previously understood.

The key word is presence. You are not absent. You are not skiving. You are so committed to your work, so thoroughly dedicated to the company, the project, the meeting, that you have exhausted yourself in its service and your body has simply, temporarily, given out. The sleep is not a retreat from work. The sleep is evidence of work.

This is, I want to say clearly, a beautiful piece of cultural logic.

In the satoyama tradition, there is a concept of ma (間) — negative space, the productive pause, the meaningful gap between actions. You do not coppice a woodland without rest. The tree does not grow without winter dormancy. The paddy does not produce without the fallow season. Rest is not the absence of work. Rest is part of the cycle.

Inemuri is ma for salarymen.

I explained this theory to Takeshi during last month’s coppicing session. He said: “Or it’s just because Japanese work culture demands extremely long hours and people are tired.” I told him to get back to work. He is probably right. I am choosing to believe my version because it is more interesting and I have a column to finish.

Part Two: The Rules of Inemuri, Which Are Extensive and Which I Find Deeply Relatable as Someone Who Manages a Commons System

Inemuri is not simply falling asleep anywhere and calling it dedication. There are rules. Of course there are rules. This is Japan. The rules are unwritten. The rules are absolute.

Rule One: Posture matters enormously.

Correct inemuri involves sleeping upright, or close to it. Head slightly bowed. Body technically at the desk or in the meeting chair. The appearance of possible wakefulness must be maintained even during complete unconsciousness. You are not sprawled. You are not horizontal. You are a professional who has briefly and respectably lost consciousness in an upright position, like a very tired statue.

Lying down is not inemuri. Lying down is absence. Lying down means you have given up the performance of presence, and the performance of presence is the entire point.

I have fallen asleep in my woodland in an upright position on several occasions, leaning against a tree I was in the middle of assessing. I did not know, at the time, that I was practicing a respected professional tradition. I thought I was just very tired. The woodland did not judge me. The woodland has never judged me. I am beginning to think the woodland was more professionally sophisticated than I gave it credit for.

Rule Two: Seniority affects permissions.

The more senior you are, the more freely you may practice inemuri. A new employee sleeping in a meeting is making a significant social gamble. A department head sleeping in the same meeting is demonstrating the weight of their accumulated responsibilities. A company president sleeping through his own presentation is either deeply powerful or having a medical emergency, and the assembled employees will wait respectfully either way until the situation clarifies.

This maps cleanly onto satoyama management, where the elder who falls asleep during a village planning discussion is understood to be resting between contributions, while the junior member who falls asleep is going to be assigned the bamboo removal.

I am 58. I am, in satoyama terms, extremely senior. I am told that in corporate Japan I would be approaching peak inemuri legitimacy. This is the most appealing thing I have heard about office employment in my entire life.

Rule Three: You must be wake-able.

True inemuri practitioners can surface from sleep instantly, cleanly, and without visible transition, like a submarine completing a controlled ascent. One moment: asleep. Next moment: fully present, possibly contributing to the meeting. No yawning. No blinking. No moment of confused transition where you don’t know what year it is.

I cannot do this. When I fall asleep I am gone for a minimum of forty-five minutes and wake up knowing exactly where I am — the woodland — but temporarily uncertain about everything else. This is apparently not the correct technique. This is why I manage a woodland and not a corporate department.

Part Three: The Train Inemuri, Which I Have Now Witnessed and Can Report On With Some Authority

You will recall that I have taken the train. You will recall my experiences on the train. You will recall the silence, the choreography, the onigiri incident, which I am still processing.

What I did not discuss in my previous column — because I was too busy being anxious about everything else — is that on my second journey, I observed inemuri in its most common natural habitat: the commuter train.

The salaryman three seats down fell asleep approximately four minutes after boarding. I watched this happen. His eyes closed with the gradual deliberateness of a man who had made a decision. His head declined to a precise angle — not far enough to suggest abandonment, exactly far enough to suggest rest. His newspaper remained folded in his lap. His briefcase remained between his feet. He was, technically, still a commuter. He was simply a temporarily non-conscious one.

He woke up — and this is the part I want you to understand — one stop before his destination. Without an alarm. Without anyone waking him. Without any visible biological process that I could observe. He simply opened his eyes, folded his newspaper to a slightly different configuration, picked up his briefcase, and prepared to exit.

I stared at him openly, which was a violation of train etiquette that I was too impressed to prevent.

He did not notice. Or he noticed and performed not-noticing, which, on Japanese trains, is functionally identical.

I have been trying to understand how he knew. Thirty-seven years of satoyama management has given me certain environmental instincts — I can read weather from cloud formations, estimate soil moisture by feel, identify tree species in winter by bark texture alone. But I cannot wake up on a moving train one stop before my destination. This man has developed a sense I do not have access to. I respect it enormously.

Part Four: Attempting Inemuri in My Own Professional Context, With Mixed Results

Following my research, I decided to attempt inemuri in my own work environment.

The woodland does not have meetings. This is one of its primary advantages. The woodland has tasks, and the tasks have seasons, and the seasons do not convene to discuss Q3 strategy. However, I identified several satoyama-adjacent situations in which inemuri might theoretically apply.

Attempt One: The Prefectural Agricultural Committee Meeting

Every three months I attend a committee meeting in the nearest mid-sized city, at which local farmers and forestry managers discuss subsidy applications, regional land-use policy, and a rotating cast of bureaucratic concerns that, I say this with respect, could be communicated in a two-page document and are instead communicated in a four-hour meeting.

I attempted inemuri at the forty-minute mark, when the discussion had turned to a sub-committee report on a sub-committee report.

I achieved sleep. This I can confirm.

I did not achieve the upright, present-appearing posture that defines legitimate inemuri. I achieved what I can only describe as a gradual structural failure, arrested at the last moment by the edge of the table.

The committee chairman — who is 71 years old and has been practicing inemuri for decades with the ease of a natural talent — did not comment. He was possibly asleep himself. It was difficult to tell. This is, I think, the appropriate response, and I am grateful for it.

Attempt Two: The Phone Call With My Son About the Equipment Delivery

My son calls me regularly about logistical matters related to farming equipment, most of which resolve themselves. During a particularly extended call about a replacement part for a brush cutter that had been shipped to the wrong prefecture for the second consecutive time, I attempted a brief inemuri while standing in the woodland.

I woke up seventeen minutes later. My son had ended the call at some point. The brush cutter situation had not resolved itself. A crow was looking at me.

I do not count this as a success.

Attempt Three: The Volunteer Orientation

When new volunteers arrive to help with woodland management, I give a brief orientation covering safety procedures, tool use, and the basic principles of coppice management. It is not, I will admit, a thrilling presentation. I have given it many times. Takeshi knows it by heart.

During the most recent orientation, I noticed that one of the new volunteers — a young man from Osaka in extremely clean hiking boots — had achieved a state that I can only describe as inemuri. Eyes slightly closed. Head minimally declined. Maintaining the posture of a person who is listening while clearly not listening.

I stopped the orientation.

I waited.

He opened his eyes after approximately eight seconds. He showed no sign of transition.

“What were the three rules about coppice rotation?” I asked.

He answered correctly.

I do not know how. I do not know if he was actually asleep. I do not know if he had read the materials I sent in advance, which nobody reads. He may simply be better at inemuri than me, which is a sentence I did not expect to write about a 24-year-old from Osaka in clean boots.

He came back the following month. I have some hope for him.

Part Five: The Deeper Philosophy, Which I Am Going to Connect to Satoyama Whether It Fits or Not

Japanese work culture, as observed from my particular vantage point — which is a woodland, in which I am usually the only person, sometimes accompanied by volunteers of variable competence — appears to operate on a fundamental tension between two values:

Presence, which is everything. Being there. Being seen to be there. Remaining at the desk until the senior person leaves, remaining in the meeting until it ends, remaining conscious on the train until, ideally, your stop.

And sustainability, which is the quiet acknowledgment that presence maintained beyond human capacity is not actually presence. That a person who has worked sixteen hours is not, in the sixteenth hour, contributing meaningfully. That the system requires the people who operate it to remain functional.

Inemuri is the resolution. You remain present. You honor the obligation of appearance. And within that performance of presence, your body takes what it needs to continue.

This is, I want to suggest, not entirely different from the iriaichi system. You do not abandon the commons. You do not withdraw from the collective obligation. But the collective obligation, properly understood, includes maintaining yourself as a functioning member of the collective. Rest is not withdrawal. Rest is maintenance.

The woodland does not produce if you exhaust the soil. The salaryman does not perform if you exhaust the salaryman. The solution, in both cases, is not to stop working. The solution is to build the rest into the system.

Kenji — who sold his fields and golfs on Tuesdays — would say I am overthinking a nap.

He is correct.

But the nap is still interesting.

Conclusion: What I Have Learned, and Whether I Will Sleep at the Next Committee Meeting

I have learned that inemuri requires a skill set I do not currently possess: the ability to sleep upright, briefly, and wake cleanly at the correct moment. I have learned that this skill appears to be developed through years of urban professional life and is not transferable from woodland management, despite certain structural similarities.

I have learned that the salaryman on the Nagoya train is operating at a level of professional unconsciousness that I find genuinely impressive and slightly supernatural.

I have learned that my 24-year-old volunteer from Osaka may be a natural talent in this area, which I am filing away as information without knowing what to do with it.

At the next prefectural agricultural committee meeting, I will attempt inemuri again. I will work on the posture. I will attempt the controlled descent rather than the structural failure. I will try to develop the instinct for waking at the correct moment, which I understand cannot be forced and must be cultivated, like coppice regrowth, on its own schedule.

I will probably fall asleep against the table again.

The committee chairman will not comment.

This is, I think, the appropriate response, and I am grateful in advance for it.

Yosi is a satoyama farmer, regional server rank 47 gacha player, and amateur inemuri practitioner based in rural Japan. He has not yet achieved clean waking. The woodland is fine. The bamboo is advancing. Takeshi has been promoted to assistant coppice manager, a title Yosi invented last month and which carries no salary but which Takeshi appeared genuinely pleased about. Some things are going well.