Jul 22, 8:02 AM
Tokyo’s summer wardrobe experiment runs into a familiar problem: the office
A campaign meant to cool workers down has instead exposed old anxieties about gender, grooming and what counts as acceptable in the workplace.
Tokyo has decided that summer office life should be less Victorian. Under the metropolitan government’s Cool Biz push, employees are being nudged away from the suit-and-tie uniform and towards T-shirts, trainers and, now, shorts. The stated aim is practical enough: when the city turns into a furnace, a bit less fabric seems like common sense rather than radical policy.
Yet even the most mundane reform in Japan has a way of becoming a referendum on manners. The new shorts-friendly guidance, introduced by Governor Yuriko Koike in April as part of Tokyo Cool Biz, has drawn mixed reactions after nearly four months in circulation. Some workers welcome the looser dress code and the comfort that comes with it. Others, less charitably, see a rule that looks suspiciously selective: men may show their legs, while women are still expected to cover up with tights. That has led to the rather exquisite phrase “leg hair harassment”, or sunehara, an online term for the discomfort some women say they feel when confronted with a colleague’s bare legs and body hair.
The city’s environmental official Noboru Watanabe told the BBC that the point was not to police wardrobes but to widen the menu of acceptable choices in extreme heat. We want to give people more options in the severe heat, not tell them what to wear. There should be no issue as long as the work attire is not offensive to anyone, he said. It is a tidy principle, though offices rarely run on tidy principles.
A June survey by Gorilla Clinic suggests the public remains divided. 53.5% opposed wearing shorts to work in summer, while 46.5% were in favour. The strongest objections, for both men and women, centred on body shape and body hair. The clinic says women made up a larger share of respondents, which it interprets as evidence that they may be more resistant to seeing a male colleague’s bare legs. Men, naturally, have not escaped the scrutiny either: some have reportedly become self-conscious about their leg hair, and the clinic’s director, Akifumi Funatsu, says more clients are seeking laser hair removal not just for cosmetic reasons but as a matter of social etiquette when wearing shorts.
None of this appeared from nowhere. Koike first promoted the summer wardrobe shift back in 2005, when she was Japan’s environment minister and launched the national energy-saving campaign known as Cool Biz. Government leaders helped normalise it, with then prime minister Junichiro Koizumi often appearing in public without a tie or jacket. After the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, the government broadened the effort with “Super Cool Biz”, extending the guidance to reduce energy use at work and at home.
This year, the heat has made the old campaign feel less like lifestyle branding and more like survival advice. Japan has been dealing with record temperatures and soaring energy prices linked to instability in the Middle East. The Japan Meteorological Agency has even coined a warning term, kokusho-bi, for days when the mercury rises above 40C. The latest weekly figures are grim enough: seven people died from heatstroke in Japan, and 4,580 were admitted to hospital in the seven days from 6 to 12 July, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency.
People are adapting in the usual Japanese way: with gadgets, products and a fair amount of discipline. Clothes with built-in fans, disposable wet towels, UV- and heat-blocking umbrellas and portable handheld fans have all become popular. Experts from the Japan Academic Network for Disaster Reduction say the real trick is heat acclimatisation, since the body needs weeks to adjust. Their advice is to start preparing during the rainy season, before the worst of summer arrives. In a country where humidity makes sweat less effective at cooling the body, that is not a luxury but a necessity.
So Tokyo’s shorts debate is not really about shorts. It is about who gets to define professionalism when the weather has already made a mockery of the old rules. In a city where the summer heat can be dangerous, the argument over bare legs may seem trivial. But workplaces are built on small conventions, and small conventions have a habit of revealing larger anxieties — about equality, appearance and how much freedom an office can tolerate before it starts looking like one.
Written by Thorben Thiede thorben.thiede@alpineweekly.com
