Quiz time! At what time does the average Japanese person wake up? December 26th, 2006 by Adamu

Q: At what time does the average (employed) Japanese person wake up?

The answer comes after the jump.

A: 6:43AM, according to Ministry of Home Affairs and Communications statistics. 64% of Japanese people wake up before 7, and two thirds are asleep before midnight, with the average person heading off to bed at 11:22PM.

Aomori prefecture wakes up the earliest (6:15). Tokyo on average wakes up after 7 and around half go to sleep after midnight, with one eighth of Tokyoites hitting the sack at 2AM or later.

I was initially concerned, if not surprised, to learn that your average Japanese person isn’t getting his or her required 8 hours of sleep every night. But then I realized that that’s pretty much the same sleep pattern that I have: wake up at 6:30, sleep at 11:30. And anyway, it turns out that the whole “people need 8 hours of sleep per night” theory is a big myth concocted by drug companies to get us to take sleeping pills! It’s nice to see that Japan has generally healthy sleep patterns, but perhaps it’s just a matter of time before some sort of “beauty sleep” fad sweeps the nation’s women…

(Source: Toyo Keizai Plus)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 at 11:06 am and is filed under Culture, Curiosities, Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to 'Quiz time! At what time does the average Japanese person wake up?'

1. Garrett Says: December 26th, 2006 at 2:57 pm

   Adamu, you bring up an interesting point here about eight hours. Sleep is such a tough to grasp topic, as studies seem to show that people who sleep slightly less live longer. (I wonder what other contributing factors there are, though – is it merely sleeping a little less or is it being busier, for instance?)
   On the other hand, I heard a sleep researcher discussing an interesting experiment he had done on NPR’s Science Friday a few months ago (if I can track down the date, I’ll get back with a link in case anyone’s interested.)
   In this study, undergrads were given a test they were led to believe counted for something academically (I think it was a foreign language test), then split into groups that got over eight hours of sleep a night, six hours a night, and a third group that got plenty of sleep, but was kept awake for two days just before taking the test again. While students who slept less reported longer study times, they did significantly more poorly than those who had consistently slept well.

   So, we might live longer on less sleep, but might also be remembering less of that long life. (Although that may be a good thing.) Perhaps it’s a quality vs. quantity of life issue.
   That said, it’s time for me to get a good four hours in.

2. Joe Says: December 26th, 2006 at 8:19 pm

   I’ve heard a few theories, e.g.:

   • Any amount of sleep is OK as long as it’s a multiple of 90 minutes.
   • If you take periodic 20-minute naps for a long enough period, the body will adjust itself so you don’t need any more than 3 hours of sleep a day.

   Personally, I feel that my performance goes up when I go out drinking, get 3 hours of sleep and then fuel myself on coffee for the following workday. Of course, it could just be that I don’t notice my mistakes…

3. Nearly half of all Japanese get less than 6 hours sleep » 世論 What Japan Thinks - Japanese Opinion Polls, Marketing Data and Japanese Market Research Translated into English Says: January 5th, 2007 at 9:09 am

   [...] As part of their 102nd Ranking Survey, DIMSDRIVE Research looked at average sleep time. 5,391 members of their monitor pool responded to their internet-based questionnaire at the start of October. In related news, Mutantfrog Travelogue reported on a recent government survey (which I might translate in full later) that showed the average Japanese person wakes up at 6:43AM. [...]

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