[brigandish]

It's not productive "work", it's desk warming because it's just as important (if not more) to show you're working than do work. Japan is horribly unproductive[1]:

> Japan ranks twenty-first for labor productivity among the 36 nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to the Japan Productivity Center’s International Comparison of Labor Productivity report. Based on OECD data, the report found that Japan’s per-hour labor productivity in 2018 was $46.8 (equivalent in purchasing power to ¥4,744); this is less than half the $102.3 level in Ireland and roughly 60% the $74.7 level in the United States. The government has raised “work-style reform” as a key task and aimed to lift productivity, but Japan has continued to be dead last among Group of Seven nations since 1970, when survey records were first available.

Once I realised that the culture is based on far more on appearance than truth, so many things made sense that hadn't before.

[1] https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00619/japan%E2%80%99s-...

[pdimitar]

I am not saying the following out of malice or bias because I have no vested interest in having any... but my observation on a lot of Asians has been that they'll work extremely hard to project a good image but not do actual good work.

I don't blame the workers of course, I blame the leadership. Japan in particular seems just like the countries of the former Soviet Bloc (like mine -- Bulgaria) where good media propaganda is prioritized much more than actually working on the country's economy.

[missedthecue]

I wonder how that is measured. Irish employees don't make unusually good salaries, and their employers don't have unusually high profit margins

[brigandish]

I also wonder. As an aside/anecdote of perhaps dubious quality, I had a mate that worked in the Office of National Statistics in the UK. He said that they'd often come up with figures for things that didn't match expectations, so they'd fudge them in case it caused a fuss.

Still, again anecdotally, I can't say that I find Japan a place of particularly efficient work. Long working hours, certainly, but efficiency… not in my experience.