What is the Logic behind Academic "Inemuri"?

Japanese salarymen are a hardworking bunch.  After hours of toiling away in the corporate cubicles, they often have to put up with hours more of semi-mandatory drinking after work "officially" ends just to build necessary (?) camaraderie with coworkers to make sure work goes smoothly.  With sleep time taken away by the drinking and the drunken stupor afterwards, it is no wonder that many salarymen feel exhausted during the day, at their corporate cubicles.  Thankfully, corporate Japan is also highly forgiving of its workers' tiredness during the day, allowing them to openly take naps at their workspaces.

The idea of short power naps at work, or "inemuri" in Japanese, is, perhaps as a result, not particularly frowned upon.  Instead, if a salaryman is seen taking a nap at his (and occasionally her) desk, it is usually taken as a sign of exhaustion after hard work, provided that the naps are not so long as to prevent productive work from being done and required tasks from being completed.  The fact that Japanese salarymen often have little freedom to work off-site, or be anywhere else other than the workplace for non-work reasons during work hours, inemuri at the desk becomes the only option for rest.

Interestingly, the author, as a PhD student at the University of Tokyo, has discovered that the presence of inemuri is not just a corporate phenomenon.  In the libraries and common areas for studying provided to students in the university, there are frequent sights of students taking power naps on tables and desks.  Admirably, the sleeping ones are often surrounded by books and laptops, evidently (or at least appearing to be) in the midst of churning out the next great academic article.  The posture students take, and the quiet approval they receive from others are no different from those received by salarymen in their inemuri.

But there is a key difference between salarymen and students falling asleep at desks.  As mentioned above, salarymen have little choice of when and how they work.  They often cannot leave their desks, cannot decide if they can have the weekend off, and cannot say no to another drinking party after hour.  But students live on much more flexible schedules.  They have short classes of no more than two hours at once in set schedules they know in advance.  They have weeks-long deadlines on assignments that they know exist from the very beginning of the semester when their courses started.  And they need not be in school when there is no class.

Because they have such flexible schedules, the "exhaustion" premise for inemuri simply goes away.  When they do not have class and do not have assignments immediately due, which are many and frequent, they can sleep all they want on their comfortable beds back in their houses, dormitories, or apartments.  They can even adjust their schedules before semesters start to maximize their sleep hours, by only picking classes in late afternoons and deliberately creating in their timetables "free" weekdays when no classes happen and they do not need to be in school physically.

Yet, students choose to go to school for their inemuri.  For non-Japanese observers of Japan, inemuri in the corporate world is already a symptom of inefficiency, where value is placed on "effort" of spending more time at work than actual valued produced.  The inefficiency is only more amplified in an academic setting where students are incapable of managing their own physical capacities in line with schedules to maintain good rest and good level of energy during school hours.  Students' deliberate borrowing of inemuri from the corporate world sacrifice efficiency for the supposed social glorification of "effort."

Granted, there could be good reasons why students have to sleep in school.  Some may be in such financially dire straits that they have to work multiple part-time jobs instead of sleeping properly every night.  And others might be in such academic pressure to produce good data and papers that they spent hours upon hours, days upon days, to make sure that they can produce the best possible outputs.  Such students are justified to have their inemuri.  However, it would not be far-fetched to say that such people are among minorities of the overall student body, who, as a collective, take too many power naps in general.

Ultimately, the cause of prevalent inemuri is not how stressful school work or work outside school may be.  Rather, it is a society that normalizes and even encourages inemuri as a sign of diligence.  That sense of diligence is not based on results of work done, but on the visual process of getting work done. Whether or not good output is produced, being visually hardworking is incentivized.  "Work for visual display" is incentivized when salarymen who are adept at presentation find themselves in favor of higher ups and ahead of the line in promotions.  It would be a shame if similar attitude get to the academic world.  

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