The Suit Is Dead in America. In Japan, It's Merely Resting.

🇺🇸 USA · 🇯🇵 Japan

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In 1991, the average Japanese household spent 19,043 yen a year on men's suits. By 2025, that figure had collapsed to 2,429 yen — roughly an eighth of its former self, per household spending data tracked by Japan's suit industry. Meanwhile in America, Gallup finds that only 3 percent of workers now wear a suit to the office at all, down from 7 percent in 2019, and yet HBR reports that 74 percent of U.S. employees genuinely cannot tell you the difference between "WFH casual" and "business casual." Both countries are drifting away from the necktie. Only one of them agreed on what should replace it.

🇺🇸 USA

🇯🇵 Japan

USA

According to a January 2025 Monster survey of more than 1,300 U.S. workers, 57 percent report having any dress code at all, and of those, 63 percent describe it as "business casual" — a phrase that, per Harvard Business Review's 2025 research, 51 percent of employers have never bothered to formally define. Only 6 percent of American workers report a genuinely business-formal environment. Gallup's polling puts the suit-wearing population at 3 percent, down from 7 percent in 2019, which means the necktie in corporate America has gone from minority uniform to cosplay.

The American approach, in other words, isn't casual so much as unregulated. There is no committee issuing guidance on what "casual" means at your specific employer; you are expected to intuit it, badly, from what the person two desks over wore on Tuesday. HBR's research on the topic — dryly titled "The New Rules of Work Clothes" — essentially concludes that there are no rules, only vibes, and vibes are a genuinely stressful compliance framework. Nearly half of workers, per Randstad USA's research, say they'd consider switching jobs for a dress code that fit them better, which is a remarkable thing to say about clothing rules that, on paper, barely exist.

Japan

Japan's relationship with formality is the mirror image: heavily regulated, but visibly eroding under its own weight. The government's Cool Biz campaign, launched by the Ministry of the Environment in 2005 to cut summer air-conditioning load, permitted office workers to drop jackets and ties from June through September; after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake triggered nationwide power shortages, the window widened to May through October, and "Super Cool Biz" pushed things further into polo shirts and sneakers. This summer, as Tokyo temperatures pushed past 34°C, some government offices began experimentally allowing shorts — a genuine novelty covered straight-faced by the Japan Times, treated with roughly the gravity of a constitutional amendment.

And yet the suit persists as the default assumption, particularly at larger and older companies, where a plain navy or charcoal suit with a white shirt remains, per multiple guides for foreign professionals, close to an unwritten requirement — right down to shoe style (laced, never loafers) and tie color (never black, unless you are attending a funeral). Hofstede Insights scores Japan at 92 on uncertainty avoidance versus America's 46, and at 95 on masculinity (competitiveness and success-signaling) versus America's 62 — numbers that map neatly onto a culture where the rules are extensive, explicit, and expected to be followed rather than reinterpreted. The suit's economic collapse — that eightfold drop in household spending since 1991 — hasn't produced American-style deregulation. It's produced a government-managed, seasonally scheduled retreat.

The Reckoning

Here is the part that should unsettle anyone assuming "casual" equals "easier": American dress codes are looser and more anxiety-inducing, while Japanese dress codes are stricter and, once learned, considerably more predictable. An American office with "no dress code" still fires people over things nobody wrote down; a Japanese office with an extremely explicit dress code will at least tell you, in writing or by clear example, exactly what's expected before you make a mistake. Ambiguity is not the same as freedom — it just relocates the anxiety from the rulebook to your own judgment.

The genuinely counterintuitive twist is who's moving toward whom. Japan is inching, cautiously and with government sign-off, toward the flexibility America already has — but doing it as a managed program with a name, a start date, and an official end date, because a country that scores 92 on uncertainty avoidance does not simply let people freelance their way into shorts season. America, meanwhile, is discovering that total flexibility has a cost nobody priced in: without shared rules, everyone is quietly auditioning everyone else's competence based on what they're wearing to a Zoom call.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — On whether jeans are acceptable in a Japanese office, one respondent noted that acceptability hinges entirely on company age and industry: newer, smaller firms often don't care, but the real skill is "reading the air" — matching your formality to whatever the room is already doing, with black denim reading as meaningfully more acceptable than blue.

Quora — Asked whether women can wear trousers instead of skirts in Japanese offices, a respondent described how many companies historically mandated skirts and heels as part of an informal uniform, but that this is loosening company by company, with more workplaces now leaving the choice — skirt, trousers, flats — up to the employee.

Blind (Tech Industry) — In a thread comparing onsite interview attire at Amazon and Bloomberg, one poster recalled being explicitly told by an Amazon recruiter not to wear a suit, while a separate commenter described suiting up for a Goldman Sachs superday and finding every other candidate in the room dressed identically formally — a reminder that "American dress code" fractures wildly by industry, sometimes within the same interview season.

Medium (expat blog, Travel Memoirs) — A foreign employee at a Japanese company described the specific requirement that men wear white shirts under their suits as the detail that most unsettled them, saying it made the office feel like a trip back to 1960, not because the rule was unreasonable, but because nobody had thought to mention it existed until they showed up in pale blue.

Conclusion

If you're weighing a move, the practical takeaway isn't "America is casual, Japan is formal" — it's that America makes you guess and Japan makes you match. Pack one good dark suit no matter which country you're headed to: in Japan you'll need it immediately and often; in America you'll need it exactly once, right before everyone tells you that you didn't need to bring it. Budget your first two weeks in either country as pure observation — watch what the room does before you commit to a wardrobe, because in both places, the actual dress code is unwritten and enforced socially rather than legally. The honest thing I'd tell a friend over a drink: in Japan you'll dress for a rulebook that at least exists; in America you'll dress for a rulebook everyone insists was abolished and then judges you by anyway.