Japan faces a serious sleep deprivation crisis

Japan is known to be a country with severe sleep deprivation with a low average rest time. Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that the average sleep time of people in this country is only 7 hours and 42 minutes, the lowest among the 33 countries surveyed and more than 40 minutes less than the general average.

Many Japanese consider the country’s sleep time among the lowest in the world to be an alarming social problem. This situation has sparked fierce competition in the recovery wear market, a product line promoted to help improve sleep and reduce fatigue. According to the Japan Management Association Research Institute, this market is expected to grow ninefold, from 18.9 billion yen in 2024 to 170 billion yen in 2030.

“Japanese people do not see the positive value of sleep, and even believe that the less sleep the better,” said Professor Yukio Toyota at Urawa University, an expert in sleep research from the perspective of cultural anthropology.

The Japanese government is also well aware of this crisis. In 2024, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare issued “Guidelines on sleep to improve health”, affirming that ensuring sleep time and quality is a key task that all people need to seriously perform.

The latest data shows that the picture of Japanese people’s sleep is undergoing remarkable changes. According to the Basic Survey of Social Life (conducted since 1976), after decades of continuous decline, the amount of sleep of people in the land of the rising sun has begun to record recovery. Specifically, in 2021, the average weekly sleep time increased by 13 minutes compared to the 2016 survey. This number even reached 15 minutes among working people and couples with young children.

The growth momentum in 2021 is said to benefit from the Covid-19 pandemic, but an online survey of “sleep index” on 10,000 employees by Brain Sleep company (Tokyo) shows that this trend will still maintain after the pandemic, with an increase of 7 minutes compared to 2021.

However, the year 2026 recorded a paradox: average sleep time suddenly decreased by 9 minutes compared to the previous year. This shows that awareness of the importance of sleep has increased, but turning awareness into a stable and sustainable resting habit is still a challenging problem.

In the labor reform process in Japan, the popularity of flexible work models is considered an important factor affecting people’s rest habits. However, behind the advantage of saving travel time and the potential to expand sleep time, working from home is revealing negative aspects of sleep quality.

A clear demonstration of this paradox is the case of a 23-year-old female telecommunications worker. Even though she works remotely 3 days a week, her rest time is still limited with only 5.5 hours of sleep per night. According to her, the lack of physical activities and direct interaction like when going to work makes the body not “tired” enough to fall asleep early, leading to the habit of staying up late for a long time.

Similarly, for a male financial industry employee in Tokyo, sleeping 6 hours a day is a “luxury”. He admitted that the extra time he had thanks to not having to travel was actually filled with stressful overtime hours. “If I don’t proactively disconnect from work before going to bed, I can hardly sleep,” he shared.

Professor Kazuo Mishima from Akita University warns that changing work patterns too often actually puts heavy pressure on the body. “When the circadian rhythm is disturbed, even though you are aware of having to wake up early the next morning, you still cannot force yourself to go to bed earlier. As a result, there will always be days in a week when you fall into a state of partial sleep deprivation,” the professor analyzed.

According to the 2024 National Health and Nutrition Survey of the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, up to 20-30% of men and women between the ages of 20 and 50 said they felt “not at all rested” or “very little rested” after sleeping. Sharing the same opinion, Ms. Midori Ando, ​​a researcher at the Japanese Institute of Sleep Science, said that people’s level of sleep satisfaction has hardly improved, even though the Covid-19 pandemic has passed with many changes in working models.

In fact, Japan is still one of the most sleep-deprived countries on the planet. With a situation that is deeply ingrained in the current social structure and labor culture, turning the situation around to bring quality sleep to people will take a lot of time.