For the Sake of What You Do: How Valuable Works Tend to be Underestimated in Japan

Exploitation is a popular word to analyze, criticize and even blame a capitalist economic system. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains it by stating, “To exploit someone is to take unfair advantage of them. It is to use another person’s vulnerability for one’s own benefit” at its beginning^*1. Its implication seems clear. Those who are exploited are weaker and more vulnerable than those who exploit and its asymmetric relationship is relatively stable, which usually means exploitation happens between haves and have-nots. In this context, it shall be a common recognition that workers in a capitalist society are exploited insofar as they are forced to sell their labor power to capitalists for less than the full value of the commodities they produce with their labor^*2. It is why workers should be protected by a labor union without which they can be easily exploited.

This paper explores and analyzes some cases seen in Japan which may make the above explanation of exploitation invalid and ineffective. These cases could be explained from a view point of valuableness of valuable works. There are several sorts of criterion to measure valuableness of work: (a) How much beneficial is it to others? (b) How much satisfying is it to yourself? (c) How much selfless are you in doing it? Criterion (c) is most important in some workplaces in Japan. It is, however, usually referred as devotion which is a different kind of human act from work. There can be seen some characteristic apparatuses which have social and cultural force to refrain labor from being seen as something to be rewarded or paid.

This view point shows how much people’s identity in work places is drenched with a sense that enduring to be exploited is welcome or even honorable in Japan.

*1 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/

*2 ibid.