The Country That Won't Take Its Vacation, and the One That Shuts Down for It

🇯🇵 Japan · 🇫🇷 France

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Japan offers more paid annual leave, on paper, than most OECD countries, and its workers use less than half of it — an Expedia survey found the Japanese take an average of 8.8 vacation days a year against a legal entitlement nearly double that, with 63 percent of respondents admitting they feel guilty booking time off at all. France, by contrast, doesn't so much take vacation as observe it as a civic ritual: the whole country slows in August, under an entitlement of five weeks of paid leave that dates to 1936, with many small businesses simply closing their doors. Moving between these two systems for work is less a change in policy than a change in what leave is even for.

Do's & Don'ts

🇯🇵 Japan

🇫🇷 France

Japan: Entitled to Rest, Unable to Take It

Japan's paid leave law is not the constraint — the culture around it is. Employees start with 10 days a year, rising to a maximum of 20, comparable to much of the OECD. What's exceptional is the take-up rate: Japan ranked last among 27 countries in Expedia's Vacation Deprivation survey, with workers leaving roughly half their entitlement unused, and the Japan Times reporting that guilt, not workload, is the most commonly cited reason. Underlying this is a historical throughline from the Meiji era, when diligence and self-sacrifice were framed as a duty to the workplace rather than a personal choice — a framing that has proven durable long after the economic conditions that produced it changed.

The consequences are serious enough that Japan tracks them as public health data. Authorities linked nearly 3,000 suicides to overwork in 2023, and the term karoshi — death from overwork — is a recognized category in national statistics, not a metaphor. The government's 2019 Work Style Reform law responded by capping overtime and requiring employers to ensure staff with unused leave take at least five mandatory days a year — a policy whose entire premise, as one Hacker News commenter observed, is that once leave is mandatory, no one can be individually judged for taking it.

France: Vacation as Infrastructure, Not a Perk

France runs on the opposite assumption: that not resting is the failure state. The 35-hour work week, paired with RTT (réduction du temps de travail) days that compensate for hours worked beyond it, routinely pushes total paid time off past 35–40 days a year once congés payés are added in. August is the clearest expression of this: much of the country effectively downshifts together, a pattern traceable to Front Populaire reforms in 1936 that first guaranteed paid leave and have only expanded since.

For a newly arrived manager, the practical effect is that deadlines, staffing plans, and client expectations all have to route around a month that functions almost like a second Sunday. Quora threads from people relocating for work return repeatedly to the same discovery: this isn't a loose cultural norm colleagues quietly ignore, it's closer to infrastructure. Restaurants, suppliers, and even some client contacts are simply unavailable, and planning around it — rather than fighting it — is the actual skill to learn.

The Reckoning

The irony is that France's generous entitlement produces confident, guilt-free use of it, while Japan's comparably generous entitlement produces avoidance. The difference isn't the number of days on the contract — it's whether the culture treats rest as a right the group protects for everyone, or a request the individual has to justify. A French employee who skips vacation looks like they've failed to plan their life; a Japanese employee who takes all of theirs risks looking like they've failed to read the room. Anyone managing across both systems has to hold two entirely different definitions of what "using your leave properly" even means.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Hacker News — In a thread on Japan's efforts to reform its work-week culture, one commenter described how some companies had started physically taking employees' laptops and sending them home on mandatory paid leave, noting the logic explicitly: once time off is compulsory, no one can be singled out for taking it.

Quora — Someone researching a move to Paris for work described being caught off guard by how completely the country empties out in August, down to the neighborhood boulangerie, and advised treating the whole month as effectively off-limits for anything time-sensitive.

Blind (teamblind.com) — A tech worker comparing postings in Tokyo and Paris noted that colleagues in the Tokyo office would visibly track who had and hadn't used their leave, describing it as a quiet form of peer monitoring that never appeared in any official policy document.

Quora — One respondent pushed back on the idea that French vacation policy is just generous law on paper, insisting that colleagues actively check in if someone hasn't booked their five weeks, treating unused leave as a sign something is wrong rather than a virtue.

r/japanlife-adjacent discussion (via Unseen Japan reporting) — Workers described feeling that requesting leave "alone," when no one else on the team was taking time off, felt like disrupting group harmony even when management explicitly approved the request.

Conclusion

If you're moving to Japan, the practical move is to watch what your colleagues actually do, not what your contract says you're owed, and to use national holidays and mandatory leave days as your low-friction entry point. If you're moving to France, the practical move is to build your calendar around August rather than through it, and to take your full entitlement without treating it as something to apologize for. The honest version, over a drink: in Japan, permission to rest has to come from the group; in France, it already has — you just have to believe it.