Friday 2 May 2008

Only in Japan


There's one of those stories on the BBC website today that tends to make people in Western countries scratch their heads and say, "Only in Japan": it's about a local council worker who accessed 780,000 pornographic websites over a 9 month period while supposedly at work. (During the "peak" of this period - if that's not an unfortunate phrase to use in the circumstances - he was hitting 177,000 a month, which works out at around 20 for each minute he was at his desk. That's each minute, I say again. Each minute.)

What's more unusual about the story is that the man in question wasn't sacked; he was just demoted and lost some pay. This is for presumably doing nothing for nine months except look at porn. I'd heard that Japan has some very proactive labour laws, but blimey. I wonder what he would have had to do to get the sack.

Actually, scratch that. I don't wonder about that at all. Let's pretend I never brought the matter up...

1 comment:

NathanRyder said...

I saw that story earlier; I was wondering if they had got the facts slightly wrong and it was later going to be revised to "a young British man working in Japan..."

It couldn't only happen in Japan, but I imagine that you would be fired for it in the UK, do not pass GO, do not collect two hundred pounds.