JAPAN IS A MICRO-NAPPING SUPERPOWER

One of the big advantages of Japan being a "safety country" is that you can take a nap almost anywhere, and be reasonably sure that when you wake up nothing bad will have happened. 

But taking naps is not just for lazy people. In fact, quite the reverse. In Japan the need to take frequent "micro naps" in public spaces, like on trains, in meetings, or at work, is seen as proof that you have been putting your all into your job and well deserve your forty winks.

Here it is called "inemuri" (居眠り), literally "sleeping where you are," and is considered high status behaviour. What's more, it's actually considered an effective way to boost your waking performance in the rest of your day, with a growing body of scientific evidence pointing to the benefits.

Some of the evidence comes from America, where taking a short nap out in the open is normally just asking to become a crime scene. For example, a NASA study, under heavily protected laboratory conditions, found that a 26-minute nap improved pilots’ cognitive performance by 34% and alertness by 54%.

Google Japan has embraced the concept, providing nap pods or quiet rooms for employees to take short breaks, and other companies are following. But, to be frank, most Japanese companies expect their employees to do their micro-napping on their own and wherever they can, without dedicated help from the company. After all, the beauty of "inemuri" is that you can do it just anywhere.

Photo credit: Amir Jina/Flickr

But it's not just companies that are taking an indulgent attitude to short naps. Some years ago a high school in Fukuoka Prefecture started to encourage students to take 15-minute naps during breaks. As a consequence teachers reported improved academic performance and reduced fatigue among students, demonstrating the practical impact of power napping in educational settings.

The best time for a micro-nap is considered to be between 1:00 PM and 3:00 PM, when the body naturally experiences a post-lunch dip in alertness, but avoid napping too late in the day to prevent interference with night-time sleep.

But this is simply not a top-down phenomenon in Japan. It's much more of a grassroots thing. Ordinary Japanese, snoozing on the train or nodding off at some ceremony or other, instinctively realised that tuning out for a few minutes was the ideal way to fight fatigue, improve concentration, sharpen mental clarity, and slough off stress. In fact, Japan probably wouldn't work without scenes like this:
 

Only in Japan