Time perception in Japan

Japanese are known as very punctual, hardworking, socially anxious and always busy people.
Their punctuality sometimes feels crazy when they try to come to an appointment 15 minutes or
even half an hour earlier than needed. If you’re even one minute late for work or school, this counts
as being late. If someone is often late he may be rebuked or lose his job at all. But they also never
finish their work, meetings or classes on time. Does it mean that they are not as punctual as we
expected? Or they don’t have a special type of time perception, different from the basic ones
(monochromic and polychronic)? Let’s find out.
Japanese have not always been so concerned about time. By the end of 19-th century been late
was normal thing in Japanese society because ordinary citizens had no mechanical watches. 12
times a day time was announced by temple or tower bells. They used only incense clocks, invented
in China. Time was measured by burning incense that allowed to have an idea of minutes, hours or
days at a particular rate of combustion. From the middle 19-th century new government introduced
the new USA-oriented (and Europe-oriented) policy and started the modernization of Japan. The
Japanese abandoned the traditional calendar and the old time system in 1872. The week was divided
into seven days and the day into 24 hours. With the new reforms they began to learn punctuality.
The cultural anthropologist Edward Hall believed that people have two types of time
perception: monochromic and polychronic. People with monochromic type are more organized,
punctual and time for them is a one line (so they are more concentrated on doing one thing at a
time). Polychronic cultures are more relaxed about time, they tend to do multitasking and appreciate
relationships. People tend to consider the Japanese a monochromic culture? But actually it is partly
wrong. They really are too concerned about getting things started on time, but they have loose
attitude about how they will be finished. For example, they never leave their working place when it
is time to go home. They work until all the tasks will be done or until the boss will go home. There
are two reasons: crazy hardworking and “self-presentation”. They try to make good impression to
others whatever it takes because of another cultural feature – reputation institute. It has immense
importance in Japan.
So these people are somewhere in the middle of two types of perception: they have
monochromic conception of starting things and polycronic ideas about their ending, because the
first type was integrated in their society quite recently.