Burdened with household chores and outdated notions about work, Japanese women get the least amount of sleep among 33 countries surveyed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Overall, Japanese people sleep on average 7 hours and 22 minutes a day, the shortest time among the 33 countries, according to a 2021 survey conducted by the OECD.

The survey covered 30 OECD members, including Japan, as well as China, India and South Africa.

Japanese women sleep 13 minutes less than their male counterparts on average, a gender trend seen in only six countries, the survey showed.

“Even as more Japanese wives work outside the home, husbands’ household work time is still surprisingly short compared with those in other developed countries,” said Michinori Hirata, a professor emeritus of home economics at Hiroshima University’s Faculty of Life and Environmental Science.

Household-related work time of dual-income couples with children under 6 years old is 6 hours and 33 minutes for wives and 1 hour and 55 minutes for husbands, according to the Japanese government’s 2021 survey on time use and leisure activities.

Hirata believes wives are sacrificing their sleep time to do household chores.

INEQUALITY IN HOUSEHOLD CHORES

“I’m the one who sleeps the least,” said a 47-year-old woman who lives with her husband, 51, their son, 15, and their daughter, 13, in Osaka Prefecture.

Her husband returns home around 10 p.m. at the earliest. She serves him dinner, washes the dishes and goes to bed after her son, who is studying for a high school entrance exam, takes a bath around midnight.

She wakes up just after 6 a.m. to prepare breakfast for her family. Her husband leaves home for work before 7 a.m.

The mother then works as a part-timer until evening. When she returns home, she makes dinner.

At most, she gets about six hours of sleep.

“I’ve been living like this for a long time,” she said.

‘WORK WITHOUT SLEEPING IS A VIRTUE’

The fact that Japanese women sleep less than men is not new.

About 50 years ago, Hirata and other researchers conducted a government-commissioned survey in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, and found that women had shorter sleep times than their husbands.

The researchers were all men, so no one, including Hirata, felt that it was a problem.

“I think we were raised in a culture where wives got up earlier to prepare breakfast and do the household chores, so we weren’t surprised (by the survey results),” he said.

But two months later, he compared the Japanese results with those of similar surveys conducted in 10 other countries, including the United States and European nations.

“It completely changed my mind,” Hirata said.

Although the sleep time of working married women was shorter than their husbands’ slumbers in some countries, Japan was the only nation where full-time homemakers slept less than their working husbands.

The survey in Japan was conducted three times until 2013, and the trend was the same.

Women in their 50s sleep the least on weekdays among all age groups in Japan, with an average of 6 hours and 36 minutes, according to a 2020 national survey on lifestyles conducted by the Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK) Culture Research Institute.

They were followed by women in their 60s with 6 hours and 52 minutes of daily sleep, and women in their 40s with 6 hours 53 minutes.

Yoko Komada, a professor of hypnology at Tokyo Institute of Technology, said the short sleep time among middle-aged women can be attributed to societal factors, such as household chores, child-raising, nursing care and their higher positions in the workplace.

She said the balance of female hormones has an impact on the quality of sleep.

For example, women during their pre-menstrual period often feel drowsy during the day but have difficulty sleeping at night.

Komada said changes in hormones, such as during pregnancy and menopause, also affect the quality of sleep.

“In Japan, I feel that people still think ‘working without sleep is a virtue,’” Komada said. “I want more people to understand that not getting seven hours of sleep for adults can cause physical and mental problems as well as lead to poor performances at work.”

Her advice includes: being active during the day to get a good sleep at night; suppressing blue light from smartphones at night; and sleeping a little longer on weekdays instead of trying to catch up on sleep on weekends.

(This article was written by Shiori Tabuchi and Chisato Matsumoto.)