Inemuri-Blessed to be asleep while present!

If you are in Japan, this cannot escape your eyes! You will find Japanese have an uncanny ability of falling asleep almost anywhere at anytime. Since I came to Japan, I have seen people sleeping in the metro (surprisingly no commuter ever seems to sleep through their stops!!), benches on busy streets, restaurants and parties (strangely enough!). It may sound hard to believe but sleepers are not so hard to find waiting in line at the platform, in discotheques, among the spectators of a closely contested baseball match, in lecture rooms, conferences and so on - where taking a nap may seem to be an unusual social conduct in other societies. However, it is common among Japanese, while doing so, to take particular pride in being very busy that they can not afford to get enough sleep at night. Well, only slackers get a full-night’s sleep. Just beat it! Follow the link for some interesting pictures http://acidcow.com/pics/15563-very-unusual-japanese-art-27-pics.html

While it is clear that this is sociologically distinct from the nocturnal sleep, it can be best understood by the term inemuri in Japanese. It is used to mean a state of shallow sleep or a short sleeping period outside the bed or futon i.e., mainly in public. The sleeper is present in a situation other than that intended for sleep.

Dr Brigitte Steger, Fellow of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Downing College, Cambridge regards inemuri as a form of social retreat. Although sleep stands in opposition to work, her findings suggest, sleep constitute an important precondition for the smooth performance of work by giving people sufficient opportunity to recuperate. Long hard slog is so typical in Japanese culture. As they find little opportunity to recuperation outside the work setting, they find ways to circumvent regulations so that they may recuperate within that setting. Digging deeper into the sociological concept of inemuri, she argues “the ambiguous existence of inemuri during work can be understood as a subordinate involvement which is subject to the rules of these kinds of involvements.” To learn more about the Japanese habit of sleeping visit her website at

http://www.ames.cam.ac.uk/general_info/biographies/japanese/Steger.htm.