The Japanese practice of inemuri is one that many westerners would envy with all their hearts. It describes what would be a severe faux pas in any European or North American workplace, and would be embarrassing almost anywhere.
Translated literally, inemuri means “being present while sleeping”, and indeed that describes the practice fairly literally as well, because inemuri is going to sleep in front of people while you are meant to be doing other things – which can, and often does, include sitting in a meeting room and listening to them speak.
Inemuri is not shameful, however, as it would be in the west, where sleeping on the job – let alone in a meeting – signals a loss of self-control, and therefore weakness. Instead, it is conventionally understood to mean that the sleeper is so dedicated to their work that they are momentarily exhausted by it. If carried out correctly an inemuri is an honourable kind of minor failure, like having no time to eat lunch, or 200 unanswered emails. It’s a commercial war wound to show off.
But only if carried out correctly. Because there are rules. “It depends who you are,” says Dr Brigitte Steger, an Austrian sociologist based at Cambridge University with a special interest in Japanese culture. “If you are new in the company and have to show how actively you are involved, you cannot sleep. But if you are 40 or 50 years old and it is not directly your main topic, you can sleep. The higher up the social ladder you are, the more you can sleep.”
Another rule of inemuri governs posture – because what is honourable, is to fall asleep despite your best efforts, not on purpose. “Your body needs to pretend that you are active in a meeting, like you are concentrating,” Steger says. “You cannot sleep under the table or anything. You have to sit as if you are listening intently, and just put your head down.” If you can find a stable arrangement, an inemuri can then last for five minutes, 30 minutes, an hour … as long as necessary. If someone speaks to you, you just have to wake up and answer. Afterwards you can happily tell friends that you did an inemuri during the meeting, or even say that it happens often. What you cannot do is check in advance which parts of a meeting you should sleep through.
Japan is a very underslept nation – either the most underslept in the world or the second most, after Korea, depending on which study you read – so you might expect them to need such a drastic solution. Yet napping, and the need to nap, are universal. Abundant research – at the universities of Loughborough, Pennsylvania, California and many others – shows the immediate and pronounced benefits of even just 10 or 20 minutes sleep on a tired mind. (That’s if you need research to tell you that sleep makes you feel better when you’re feeling sleepy.) In short it is rather odd that almost the whole world, and especially the cities where so many people spend their days, have not yet found a way to incorporate napping into the culture.
And goodness knows people have tried. In 2000, the city of Vechta in northern Germany became briefly famous for allowing civil servants to nap during the day, apparently with good results, but without provoking many imitators. Right now in London for instance, if you need a nap you can use some spas, such as Margaret Dabbs at Liberty in the west end, where for some reason they’ll also spray you with “negative ionized salt particles”. (Price: £35 for one nap, or £240 for 10.) You can book into one of the city’s hundred or so “day use” hotels (minimum price: £45), which “allow you to have a rest or” (brace yourself) “a moment sexier”. During London’s Clerkenwell Design Week, tired workers were able to pencil in 10 minutes of shut-eye in the ‘sleeperie’ installation. Or if the weather is good, you can lie down in the park. But that is about it.
Last spring, sensing the unmet need for naps in cities around the world, two people in the Netherlands created Googlenaps.info, a site that allowed suitable spots to be marked on Google’s mapping software. It now seems to be out of use. There are capsule hotels, famously, in Japan and other parts of East Asia (banks of cheap coffins for people to sleep in) but these are more often used overnight. Indeed, even with capsule hotels and inemuri available to them, surreptitious napping in internet and manga cafes is much more common in Tokyo, according to Steger. Desperate nappers everywhere can even turn to the “ostrich pillow” – essentially a huge boxing glove for your head – as long as they don’t mind looking utterly ridiculous. Practically speaking, though, if you want to take a nap in London, New York, Toronto, or most other cities, you have to go to the toilet, or look around for a discreet chair.
Probably the most determined movement towards a napping infrastructure comes in airports, train stations and offices, which in a few cases provide special nap rooms or pods. Employees at some offices of Apple, Nike, BASF, Opel, Google, the Huffington Post and Proctor & Gamble (but not the Guardian) can use designated nap facilities when they feel the need. So too can students at the universities of Manchester and East Anglia, among others around the world. But we are talking here about a fraction of a fraction of enough. Toilet breaks happen throughout the day, remember, but everybody tends to need their naps in the early afternoon, so it would take a huge number of rooms or pods to accommodate even half of them.
And how many have you seen in the wild? When contacted both Sleepbox, a British manufacturer of nap pods, and Metronaps, a New York rival, say that they are seeing more interest in their products, but decline to say how many are currently in use around the world. (Metronaps’ website says “hundreds”.) “[Employers] just need a little help to implement this paradigm shift in the workplace from a practical and cultural perspective,” says Christopher Lindholst, CEO of Metronaps.
He may be right, but “a little help” may also be much bigger than it seems. Because culturally, we have a problem with sleep. People can do without it if they have to, unlike going to the toilet, so that is what’s expected. It is also less spectacular or unhygienic, so occasional lapses are not quite so catastrophic. Sleep must be done in private when possible, that’s the rule, or surreptitiously when not. Hence the idea of the “power nap”, reputedly coined by the Cornell psychologist James Maas in 1998, which has caught on in theory but not in practice. Indeed its brave attempt to rebrand sleep as something dynamic – in the same way that Metropods calls its office bed the EnergyPod – reveals the image problem that sleep has.
Meanwhile the challenge of staying awake has only risen with the growth of cities, where people work all day on chairs in warm offices. By making big cities possible, commuter trains have also created a culture of rising earlier and spending the day further from your bed, with the result that fewer people can slip home at lunchtime. Ironically, commuter trains now also provide the one place where naps are acceptable and convenient. Not very convenient, though, since nobody commutes in the early afternoon, and there’s always the risk of missing your stop. Instead of incorporating naps into daily life, what we incorporate instead is a lot of coffee - one industry that has grown enormously in the past 20 years. Coffee costs money, however, and works less well. Nevertheless, boasting about how much coffee you drink is the western inemuri.
Worse still, in those countries that have a nap culture, it is in decline. The siesta of Spain and much of the Hispanic world seems to be slowly disappearing, as does the French lunchbreak and the Italian riposo. It is easy to get misty-eyed about this, but there are good reasons why a long lunchbreak may not be ideal either. It is just not convenient to be out of the office when the rest of your continent is working. It also tends to extend the work day deep into the evening, with the result that many people see less of their children.
Perhaps the closest that exists to a healthy napping culture can be found in China, in the colder regions as well as the hot ones, where the nap or wu shuy (taken during the lunchtime rest or xiu xi) is a national institution. Like all national institutions it also has a tangled political history, and isn’t universally approved of, but generally speaking being seen asleep during the day is not considered shameful by the Chinese. Indeed the right to xiu xi was specifically included in Mao’s constitution.
If public napping ever does take off, the boost to health and productivity may well be tremendous. And it has other benefits as well, for those who enjoy office intrigue. “Sometimes actually people pretend to sleep,” Steger says, speaking again of inemuri. “That’s if someone doesn’t want to be bothered. Or I know of one person in a very high position who pretends to sleep so that people around him are allowed to speak without being afraid of saying something wrong … and then of course he can hear what they’re talking about. But of course people do usually know that he is only pretending to be asleep, so they only pretend to be very frank.” In an office like that surely no one need apologise for feeling tired.
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