＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
I previously wrote an article titled, “24-Hour Business” is overkill! It can be a distant cause of “labor shortages” and “deaths from overwork!” This time, I would like to consider the idea of being open all year round.
When I was a child, department stores had one regular holiday per week. The same was true for regular stores. Even in places that didn’t have regular holidays, I think they were closed for the first three days of the New Year and had an Obon holiday.
１．A store that is open all year round without having a fixed closing day
Seibu Department Store Takatsuki branch was completely open all year round and had been open since January 1st.
The supermarket Koyo Hankyu Takatsuki store is also open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, from January 1st.
While many places are closed for a few days around the beginning of the year, there is a wide range of stores that are open all year round without having fixed holidays, including not only the convenience stores, supermarkets, fast food restaurants, family restaurants, internet cafes, karaoke bars, izakaya chains, bookstores, and pharmacies mentioned in the previous article about stores that are open 24 hours a day.
Nowadays, it seems that only a minority of businesses, such as small independent shops, barber shops, and beauty salons, have regular closing days.
２．The problem with “Open 365 days a year”
As companies are cutting staff through restructuring, “death from overwork” has become a problem, and people are calling for a “work-life balance” and “ensuring private time.” The convenience store industry, for example, is currently facing a serious labor shortage, placing an excessive burden on store owners.
If commercial facilities and stores try to stay open all year round, they will not be able to take “everyone’s days off at the same time” and will have to manage with a small number of staff, which will inevitably create difficulties.
３．Movement to reconsider “open all year round”
Recently, au, the mobile phone store I use, has started closing on the second Wednesday of every month.
NTT Docomo also seems to have a similar system in place, this time once a month.
The results of a survey conducted by Yahoo! in 2016 asking “What do you think about supermarkets and department stores that are open all year round?” (with approximately 175,000 respondents) showed that 68.4% of respondents said “They should increase the number of closing days,” 23.0% said “The way things are is fine,” and 6.3% were undecided.
The results of this survey show that approximately 70% of consumers and users think that stores do not need to be open 24 hours a day or every day of the year, and that there should be more days off.
It’s true that some people have had the trouble of a store being closed, but it’s something that can be managed.
Today in Japan, there are far too many stores that are open all year round, which has resulted in labor issues that cannot be ignored.
First and foremost, we need to ask company managers to consider abandoning the “open all year round” policy that is based on the “sales-first mentality.”
At the same time, although “it is up to company managers to decide which days their companies are closed,” we also need the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare to consider providing appropriate guidance from the perspective of worker health and safety and hygiene management.