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by skokage 2307 days ago
FTA: >"Japan has changed its strategy in combating the contagion, seeking to slow its spread and minimize the number of deaths."

In my personal opinion living and working here, this society is very slow to change and things that could greatly assist in slowing the spread, such as adopting a Work From Home policy, will only occur once it's too late. Almost no one is allowed to work from home here, even those with office/tech jobs that can completely be done remotely with no issues. In addition, workers are granted an incredibly small amount of days off, and most would rather get onto their very crowded trains and commute into the office even when unwell as opposed to taking one of their limited days off.

All that being said I'm not freaking out about it the way most people here are, but I wish companies would react a bit faster and change their work culture to accommodate the very easy things that could be done so people can limit their interactions with others when something like this is occurring. You can pretty much guarantee that one person with the virus getting onto a sardine can train during their morning commute is going to infect several other people in the process, and no amount of face masks the people here are so fond of will do anything to keep an infection at bay.

3 comments

Not sure if it's already too late, but I and most of my friends who work in different tech companies here in Tokyo have been working from home since yesterday.
Could be that my (IT) company is an outlier, but we've been told that we should work remote and only come to the office if we absolutely must. And if we do go to work, we are to avoid riding the trains during rush hour. Business trips are all canceled.

Well that's the company I'm employed by, but the company I'm currently deployed at (until today) is an automotive company and they don't seem ready to allow much remote work to take place.

> my (IT) company

IT as in Information Technology or Italy?

I’m having flashbacks from Plague Inc.