Tokyo plans 4-day working week in effort to boost births

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The Tokyo Metropolitan Government will allow its staff to work a four-day week as authorities in the world’s largest city begin a radical experiment to reverse Japan’s low birth rate.

The programme, which adds Tokyo to a growing global movement among local and central governments to embrace the “four-on, three-off” approach to work-life balance, comes as Japan’s population is on track for its 16th consecutive year of decline.

The Tokyo government’s project, which will begin in April 2025, lets employees adjust their working hours to completely free up one day of their choice each week. The project is set to benefit tens of thousands of city government employees.

The larger bloc of non-work time and the greater flexibility should — in theory — make child-rearing less daunting. The number of babies born in Tokyo dropped by more than 15 per cent between 2012 and 2022.

“We will continue to review our work style in a flexible manner so that nobody has to sacrifice their careers due to life events such as giving birth and caring for children,” said Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike at the city’s most recent assembly meeting this month, where the four-day week plans were set out.

She added that the goal of empowering women was a long-standing problem for Japan and an area where the country “has lagged far behind the rest of the world”.

Tokyo’s four-day week experiment follows similar programmes in the local governments of prefectures and towns around Japan.

Koike’s enthusiasm comes in part from engagement with 4 Day Week Global, a UK-based non-profit that promotes what it says are the manifold benefits of a shorter working week. The organisation has conducted pilot trials around the world to assess the impact of a policy that often encounters fierce resistance from traditionalists. 

The founders of 4 Day Week Global described the step taken by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government as “extraordinary, in a country that has such a reputation for non-flexibility in this area and has an actual word [karoshi] for death by overwork”.

Founder Charlotte Lockhart said the results were “boringly consistent” in four-day week pilots that the group ran in 20 countries with different political systems, social expectations around work and at different points of economic development, including South Africa, Brazil and Germany.

“Productivity goes up, the ability to attract and retain staff improves, and sick days broadly halve,” said Lockhart. “The benefits become quite material, and this is something that transcends borders.”

She added that the consistency of results arose from the fact that, in any context or country, people say they lack free time. In the case of Japan, she said, the authorities have identified this as part of the reason why births remained low.

Tokyo’s bet on the magical powers of the four-day week comes as the number of babies born in Japan in 2024 is on course to fall below 700,000 for the first time since records began in 1899.

The figures underscore Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s recent warning that Japan’s demographics are a “quiet emergency . . . that challenge the very foundations of the country”. The economy is already grappling with the consequences of a labour shortage and the world’s highest ratio of elderly people. The decline in birth rate has been more rapid than expected.

The number of babies born in Japan fell below 1mn in 2016 and below 800,000 in 2022, despite government efforts including cash incentives for larger families, tax breaks and the creation of more day care facilities.

Tokyo’s efforts to address low births have become increasingly desperate. The metropolitan government this year launched a dating app in the hopes that its official association with the software and strict rules on membership would alleviate concerns and attract users serious about forming marriages and families.

Along with personal and educational details, the app requires users to promise that they are using it with the goal of marriage rather than for short-term relationships. Governor Koike is among many politicians who see Japan’s low marriage rate as a direct hindrance to more births.