Sabisu Zangyo or the Right to Disconnect: Overtime in Japan and France

🇯🇵 Japan · 🇫🇷 France

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

France legislated a right to ignore your work email after hours in 2017. Japan has a specific word — sabisu zangyo, "service overtime" — for the unpaid hours employees log anyway, on top of a legal cap that already permits up to 100 hours of overtime a month at large firms. One in ten Japanese employees now works more than 80 overtime hours monthly, per recent government survey data, putting a fifth of the workforce at documented risk of karoshi, death from overwork. The average French employee works roughly 1,490 hours a year; the average Japanese employee works around 1,611 — and that gap undersells the real difference, because so much of Japan's overtime goes unrecorded by design.

Do's & Don'ts

🇯🇵 Japan

🇫🇷 France

Japan's overtime culture persists despite genuine, repeated legal reform. The 2019 Work Style Reform capped large-company overtime at 100 hours a month with penalties for non-compliance, and extended the same hard cap to small companies by 2023 — real regulatory teeth. But the gap between law and practice remains wide: MHLW data shows a portion of overtime, sabisu zangyo, goes entirely unrecorded, performed out of a sense of obligation or loyalty rather than requirement. Karoshi remains a formally recognized cause of death, with compensation claims for overwork-related illness and suicide continuing to rise even as average headline work hours edge down. Sector matters enormously — engineering and tech roles, and especially foreign-owned companies operating in Japan, trend meaningfully better than traditional finance, consulting, or legacy manufacturing firms.

France's approach treats overtime as something to be actively priced and limited by statute rather than culturally discouraged. The 35-hour week, in force since 2000, functions as a legal trigger: work beyond it, and overtime premiums kick in immediately — 25 percent for the first eight hours, 50 percent beyond 43. Executive employees (cadres) typically work outside strict hourly tracking but receive RTT days instead, a structural trade of flexibility for guaranteed time off. The 2017 right-to-disconnect law, requiring companies with more than 50 employees to establish rules against after-hours email expectations, formalized something the culture already leaned toward — French workers report far less of the "always-on" pressure common in Japan or the US, and Dropbox's own coverage of the law found genuinely reduced after-hours email volume at compliant firms.

The Reckoning

The real divergence isn't the number of legal hours — it's the gap between what the law says and what actually happens. France's legal framework and its lived culture are closely aligned: the 35-hour week broadly predicts real weekly hours, and the right to disconnect broadly predicts real after-hours behavior. Japan's legal framework and its lived culture have a much larger gap: a 40-hour statutory week and a 100-hour overtime cap coexist with a widespread unpaid-overtime practice that formal statistics undercount by design. If you're the kind of professional who trusts written policy as a reliable predictor of daily reality, France will reward that trust and Japan will punish it.

There's also a philosophical difference underneath the numbers. France treats rest as an enforceable right the state must actively protect from employer overreach. Japan, even mid-reform, still treats overtime substantially as a matter of individual loyalty and face — declining it, even when legally entitled to, can carry a real social cost that no statute addresses.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — A respondent addressing whether Japanese working hours are genuinely longer than other countries pointed out that headline statistics undercount the real picture significantly, because so much overtime in Japan goes unrecorded as a matter of workplace norm rather than legal requirement.

Quora — Someone explaining why overtime is so prevalent in Japan argued it functions less as a productivity necessity and more as a visible signal of commitment — staying late is frequently read by managers as loyalty regardless of whether the additional hours produce meaningfully more output.

Quora — A response to "as a foreigner, is it worth working in Japan" advised that anyone prioritizing work-life balance should specifically target foreign-owned companies operating in Japan, since Japanese firms — even reformed ones — tend to retain considerably more overtime pressure in practice.

Blind — A thread titled "japanese brutal work culture" collected a range of firsthand accounts, with several engineers describing a stark difference between their contract's stated 40-hour week and the unspoken expectation to stay until their manager left, regardless of whether there was actual work remaining to do.

Conclusion

If you're moving to Japan, choose your employer with real care — the difference between a foreign-owned tech company and a traditional Japanese firm in the same city can be the difference between a 40-hour week and a genuinely damaging one, and the written policy will not reliably tell you which you're getting. If you're moving to France, trust the 35-hour framework, use your RTT days without guilt, and treat the right to disconnect as a real boundary, not a suggestion. My honest line for a friend over drinks: France wrote work-life balance into law and then mostly lives by it. Japan wrote it into law and is still negotiating with its own culture about whether to actually follow it — don't assume the paperwork tells you which side of that negotiation your specific employer is on.