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Paper short abstract:

This talk explores time-use surveys as a form of knowledge and as a longitudinal window into the lives of ordinary Japanese citizens. It deconstructs the finding that time spent on leisure, paid labor, and housework for working-age men and women barely changed from 1941 to 2020.

Paper long abstract:

Since their origination in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, time-use surveys have been a staple of sociological research, illuminating the division of labor and leisure, public health, and work-life balance. Perhaps more than any other instrument, these surveys reflect the attitude (often traced to the era of industrialization) that “time is money” and must be allocated according to a socially beneficial breakdown of productive activities. Today, international organizations routinely deploy time accounting to facilitate cross-national comparisons and make far-ranging policy recommendations. Remarkably, however, the history of time-use surveys remains obscure and unstudied in any national context, including Japan (one of the earliest and most consistent adopters of such research). The first known time-use study in Japan was carried out mere months before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Suspended during World War II, data collection resumed on a five-year cycle in 1960 and has continued to the present. Each survey has amassed data for 30-70,000 people, who record their activities in fifteen-minute increments over the course of a twenty-four hour period.

In this talk, I deconstruct time-use surveys as a form of knowledge reflecting evolving ideas about time, statistics and modeling, social participation, human activity, and power relations. I also use them as a longitudinal window into the lives of ordinary citizens. (Although social scientists regularly draw on the contemporary data, studies reaching back to the twentieth century are few.) Astonishingly, my calculations show that the time breakdown among leisure, paid labor, and housework for working-age Japanese men and women has barely budged from 1941 to 2020! This incredible finding defies the academic assumption that technological development, falling birthrates, rising educational access, changing gender norms, labor legislation, and other postwar transformations enabled people to reduce time spent on domestic and paid work and increase time for personal enjoyment. I explain the statistical methods behind my calculations; explore variation within age, occupational, educational, and geographic cohorts; and contextualize my findings alongside similar data for other developed nations. The apparent stability of time use in Japan, I argue, challenges much of what we believe about the emancipatory power of modernity/modernization.