The Japanese take very few vacations and generally accumulate overtime. But there are things we don’t joke about like the launch of the latest installment of the cult video game “Zelda: Tears of Kingdom”.
For some time now, we have seen more and more Japanese employees taking exceptional days off. Some businesses are even forced to close for 24 hours. A curious phenomenon in a country where we work without counting our hours and which only offers ten days of paid vacation per year (and 20 public holidays). But what wouldn’t we do to allow our employees to satisfy their passion?
Thus, we witness the phenomenon at least once a year in Japan. In fact, with every release of a highly anticipated video game, there is a surge in the number of requests for exceptional leave. Last Friday, the big trend on social media in Japan was the word “Zeruda Yasumi”, which means Zelda holidays. It was indeed the day of the launch of one of Nintendo’s star games, the game Zelda, Tears of Kingdom.
Fans of the saga had been waiting for this release for six years and tens of thousands of people were waiting for the opening of electronics stores in all cities of the country to be able to pick up the game in the morning and then spend the day afterwards on their console. Switch. We are talking about a game that still sells more than 30 million copies.
Before these Zelda holidays, there had been, in 2021, a major holiday movement, monster hunter. It was, this time, for the release of a game from the Japanese studio Capcom. There too, hundreds of thousands of employees had taken their day to recover their beloved game. To the point that SMEs had to ask their teams to consider that the whole day was off. The company Mark-On, a specialist in virtual reality, had even given a “day off” (a day off) to its employees, explaining that, anyway, no one would be able to concentrate that day.
To play or… to mourn a J-Pop star who is leaving
But these exceptional leaves remain very rare even if there are companies a little more attentive to the passions of their employees. Another company in Tokyo called Hiroro has created a holiday for fans of Japanese girl bands. There are many men who have a passion for these groups of very young women who make J-Pop and who have a whole system of loyalty from their fans, who meet them regularly. These groups exist but with rotations of artists. When a young dancer singer is too old or has met someone, she has to leave the formation and it is a personal drama for the fans. And so at Hiroro, your boss lets you take a day for yourself to mourn.
However, it would be wrong to think that Japanese companies have very flexible human resources policies. It’s even the opposite. They are, on the whole, not very attentive to their employees. There are a lot of problems with moral harassment and very serious overwork. And it’s not going to get better since the country is facing huge labor shortages due to its demographic collapse.