Japan Still Comes Into the Office. France Perfected Not Answering the Phone.

🇯🇵 Japan · 🇫🇷 France

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In fiscal 2025, 25.2 percent of Japan's employed workforce reported teleworking, according to the government's own Telework Population Survey — a rate the ministry described, without apparent irony, as a "modest rebound." In France, a right to disconnect that started as a 2017 legal footnote has, by 2025, hardened into binding rules obliging employers to specify exact hours during which they are not allowed to email you. One country is celebrating a single-digit percentage-point recovery in remote work. The other has legislated the silence of your inbox. Both, per Hofstede Insights, score above 85 on uncertainty avoidance — which suggests the difference is not about comfort with ambiguity, but about which ambiguity each culture has decided to eliminate first.

🇯🇵 Japan

🇫🇷 France

Japan

Japan's telework rate has been inching upward since the pandemic, but "inching" is doing real work in that sentence. According to the MLIT's fiscal 2025 survey of 40,000 workers, teleworking rose just 0.6 percentage points to 25.2 percent — a stabilizing trend, officially, though one still well below most OECD peers. The OECD's own telework and productivity research attributes Japan's lag less to technology than to organizational habit: the "large-room" office layout, built for face-to-face teamwork and mutual monitoring, does not translate cleanly to a Zoom grid. The Japan Times has reported that in the wider Asia region, the pushback against remote work has been stronger than almost anywhere else, even as roughly 75 percent of employees say they'd prefer more flexibility than they're getting.

Bureaucratic friction compounds the culture. Research documented by the Library of Congress found that 40 percent of companies with telework policies still required staff to physically appear in the office — not for meetings, but to stamp documents with a hanko, the personal seal still required for many internal approvals. Presenteeism, meanwhile, has migrated indoors: a cross-sectional study of Japanese teleworkers found that less-experienced remote workers reported higher presenteeism than their office-based colleagues, logged into meetings while unwell or unfocused, evidently unwilling to look less busy at home than they would in a shared room. Tokyo's metropolitan government will pilot a four-day week for civil servants this year, which counts as a bold move only by comparison.

France

France's relationship with remote work reads, on paper, like the policy Japan keeps almost adopting. The 2025 Observatoire du Télétravail survey finds that telework, practiced by just 4 percent of active workers in 2019, now reaches 22 percent of private-sector employees monthly, averaging two stable days a week. The right to disconnect, first written into law in 2017, has since 2025 been sharpened into concrete obligations: employers must specify blackout hours for email and calls. According to the OECD's research on the geography of remote jobs in Europe, France has built one of the bloc's more codified frameworks for hybrid work, formalized through company- or team-level agreements rather than left to individual negotiation.

Yet the picture is less egalitarian than the legislation implies. Telework in France is a privilege of rank: 63 percent of cadres (senior professionals) work remotely, against just 10 percent of standard employees and 22 percent of intermediate professions, per the Observatoire. And the law has not eliminated the underlying anxiety it was written to solve — 71 percent of managers report receiving no training in hybrid management, 43 percent say telework has made managing harder, and 76 percent of employees admit to teleworking while sick anyway, usually out of workload pressure or fear of losing pay. France legislated the boundary. It has not yet legislated the guilt.

The Reckoning

Here is the joke buried in the data: measured as a share of all working days across the entire workforce, French employees spend fewer days remote, on average, than the global norm — 0.6 days a week against a 0.9-day average, according to The Local France's reporting on workplace-attendance tracking, putting France just above only Greece, Japan, and South Korea. The country with Europe's most codified remote-work law has one of the lowest average telework rates among rich democracies, because so much of the French labor market — retail, hospitality, manufacturing, the public sector outside the ministries — was never teleworkable in the first place. The right to disconnect turns out to be a right enjoyed disproportionately by the cadres who already had the most workplace power.

Japan's contradiction runs the other way: a culture famous for prizing physical presence is quietly producing a startup and tech sector where remote work is not just tolerated but a genuine recruiting tool, precisely because those firms operate outside the seniority-based structures that make presenteeism rational elsewhere. Hofstede's numbers offer a tidy shorthand for why each country solved the problem it solved: France scores 71 on individualism against Japan's 46, which tracks neatly with a system built on individual legal entitlement versus one still organized around group cohesion — even when the group is now scattered across separate apartments, each one dutifully staying logged in.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — a respondent describing Japanese corporate culture noted that at a traditional company like Mitsubishi, no one leaves before their boss does, regardless of whether the work is finished, while a more international employer like Nissan runs noticeably more relaxed and flexible.

Quora — someone researching work-from-home options in Japan was told that most such roles require existing work-visa authorization tied to the employer, and that freelance platforms like Lancers or Coconala are the realistic fallback for anyone without corporate sponsorship.

Expat Forum — a prospective remote worker moving to France discovered that hiring them from abroad would cost their employer roughly 40 percent above salary in mandatory French social charges, and that France taxes work performed on its soil regardless of where the client or paycheck originates.

The Local France — reporting aimed at foreign remote workers clarified that France has no digital-nomad visa, and that the long-stay "visiteur" permit requires signing an affidavit promising not to work at all, professional or otherwise.

Japan Dev / Daijob — accounts collected from foreign employees in Japan describe remote-work arrangements rarely advertised up front, instead surfacing casually in a first interview or emerging informally only after a manager had come to trust them over months in the office.

Conclusion

The practical difference that matters most is not the percentage of days worked remotely — it's who gets to negotiate them. In France, the right exists in statute, but it flows to the cadres who already had leverage, and it hasn't fixed the anxiety underneath it: managers are unequipped, and employees still log in sick anyway. In Japan, no such right exists in any codified sense, but the informal economy of trust — built slowly, face-to-face, then occasionally cashed in for a day at home — can end up delivering something closer to genuine flexibility, at least at the firms willing to offer it.

If a friend asked me where to hold out for a real remote job: go to France for the law and the paperwork trail, but don't expect it to reach you unless you're already senior; go to Japan for the startups, but budget a few months of showing up anyway, because nobody hands you the WiFi password until they've watched you not need it.