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Japan is known for its culture of workaholic for long. Now the Japanese government is considering stepping into stop the madness

admin2021-08-06  26
问题         Japan is known for its culture of workaholic for long. Now the Japanese government is considering stepping into stop the madness, with plans to submit legislation that would make five days of paid vacation mandatory every year. The following article gives more details of this policy.
        Write an article of NO LESS THAN 300 words, in which you should:
        1. summarize the article briefly, and then
        2. express your opinion towards the regulation, especially whether we need similar regulations in China.
                                                In Japan, It Soon May Be Illegal Not to Take Vacation
        Wake up at 7:30, commute to work, spend 13 hours in the office, run for the last train home, eat, and crash into to bed. The next day, rinse and repeat. Welcome to the insane working hours of a Japanese "salaryman" during crunch times at work It’s a schedule that sometimes leads to what the Japanese call karoshi—death by overwork. Now, in an attempt to help, the Japanese government is considering a plan to force workers to take five vacation days a year.
        "People are literally working themselves to death," says Jeffrey Johnson, a researcher at the University of Maryland who studied the phenomenon of karoshi. "There’s an accumulation of case studies of people who worked extremely intense hours, and then died when they were relatively young." A Japanese nonprofit set up by the families left behind lists one typical example: Mr. Kanameda, who worked as many as 110 hours every week at a snack food company, and died at 34. Like the U.S., where only half of workers took a single vacation day last year, Japan has a culture that makes people reluctant to take time off. "People truly believe the harder they work, the better they are," says Johnson. "And there’s this kind of samurai commitment to their employers, this devotion to duty that enables people to lose that almost instinctual self-protection."
        The problem isn’t just long hours, but the intensity of work. Some jobs also incorporate the philosophy of kaizen—continuous improvement—which asks employees to ruthlessly eliminate any second of downtime on the job.
        If the government ends up forcing people to take vacations, that may help. "It’s putting limits on the degree to which people can have this kind of socialized ’work is more important than anything else’ kind of philosophy take over their entire lives," says Johnson. "During that rest period, their body gets to recalibrate. It takes quite a while if you’ve had a very intense period of stress. Maybe longer than a typical vacation. But any vacation does help."
        If Japan needs to force workers to take vacations, then the U.S. might want to do the same (a few forward-thinking companies already are). In a year, U.S. workers work 1,800 hours—more than any other country in the world, including Japan. The less money an American worker makes, the less likely they are to take any vacation days.
        "When we do go on vacation, we bring all these electronic devices to wire us in," Johnson says. "We can’t help it. But all of this is one of the reasons there’s so much growth in things like mindfulness meditation—ways of trying to calm the body and quiet the mind. It’s happening because there’s such a great need for it in our society."
选项
答案 On Mandatory Vacations The greed of employers and increasingly fierce competition make it all the stressful to work in the present society. Karoshi, or death resulting from excessive work, is an emerging phenomenon among salarymen who are becoming overloaded with work. Japan and the USA are two industrialized countries where employees suffer from the intensity of work. The impact is so alarming that the two governments plan to force people to take vacations. I think such a compulsory approach is essential for the health of all employees and in turn for the benefits of employers and the countries who adopt the policy of mandatory holidays. Endless work makes employees suffer, physically and psychologically, so much so that some even die young in their thirties. In response to this situation, a mandatory policy is necessary which regulates that employees should take at least five days off their work. Nowadays it is not uncommon that employees sacrifice their paid leaves either willingly or reluctantly. However, if taking vacations becomes legally binding, then few people would risk violating the law and as a consequence employees will relax and rehabilitate themselves for better physical conditions. My view is that such a policy should be adopted by the Chinese government as well. China, with its booming economy, is developing at an alarming speed on the way to an industrialized country, and like the situation in most developed countries, phenomenon occurs that many salarymen in China are plagued by sub-health conditions. Since a declining level of health not only adversely affects the well-being of individuals but also aggravates the government’s financial burden of medical care, the authority should interfere in this issue by introducing a policy of mandatory vacations. In summary, although work is of great significance because it is the basic guarantee to a decent life in this competitive world, health should be given priority, for health is the guarantee to work. In order to improve health among the general population, legislation of mandatory vacations is necessary.
解析         材料围绕“日本政府计划强制休假”的话题展开讨论。文章可分为三个部分。
        第一、二段引出话题。开篇通过日本工薪阶层日常提到的“过劳死”（karoshi）这一话题，指出日本政府正在考虑强制员工休五天年假的计划。第二段解释了“过劳死”这一概念，即高强度的工作（worked extremely intense：hours）导致英年早逝（died…relatively young）。
        其次，第三、四段说明了人们拼命工作的原因。一是受到日本文化的影响，武士精神（samurai commitment）让人们失去自我保护的本能（instinctual self-protection）。二是受到日本的商业哲学（kaizen）的影响，不断追求进步，导致雇员的休息时间一再缩减。
        最后三段则是对这一政策的评价及影响。第一，虽然把人们从强压下释放出来需要很长的时间（takes quite a while），但政府强制人们休假还是有所帮助的（may help）。第二，美国人的年均工作时长高于其他国家，它也打算效仿这一做法（want to do the same）。第三，现代人休假会带上电子设备（electronic devices）以便努力工作，所以正念禅修（mindfulness meditation）随之出现。
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