Section 5 | Anthropology and Sociology | Session 8A, Session
chair: n/a
Megumi Kaji (Research Institute for Sleep and Society, Tokyo), Masayoshi Shigeta (Kyoto University) and Yukio Toyoda (Rikkyo University)
When Japan became an industrialized society, people needed to wake up every morning at the same time and go to work, and to make sure to have enough sleep at night for next day's work. It was the most important demand for 'modern' Japan to mark waking-time and sleeping-time clearly. Over the last ten years, Japan has become very much an information-oriented society and Japanese life-environment has undergone further changes. One big change is that many became 'night people" and consequently 'short sleepers.' Now many stores and services stay open until midnight or overnight because many people stay up until then. As Japanese life environment underwent such a big change, the circumstance of sleep was also influenced by this change: Social/cultural norm for waking-time and sleeping-time became more ambiguous, as did the distinction between sleep-wear and daytime-wear. We found that an increasing number of people go to bed wearing a T-shirt, and fall asleep while watching TV or listening to music. It is also found that young Japanese use their mobile phone as one of the indispensable items for sleep setting. In this presentation, we would like to report how Japanese switch their sleep setting and attitude from waking to sleeping by the analysis of sleep habits using comparative data from other countries including Asia, Africa, America and Europe.
Brigitte Steger (University of Vienna / University of Pennsylvania)
Japanese bookstores in the 1990s offered shelves full of advice books that promoted early rising, temptingly promising an increase in wealth, health, energy creativity, knowledge, time for enjoyment and overall satisfaction. In the paper I will show that these popular books are part of century-old educational endeavors to overcome inclinations of laziness and self-indulgence. By rising early and doing so in a specific way, the crucial transition from the withdrawal from social obligations (the sleep mode) to the return to the - gender-specific - performance of social duties is managed.