According to Fortune, Tokyo’s Metropolitan government started allowing its 40,000 employees to work four-day weeks beginning in April 2025. The policy also introduces “childcare partial leave” letting some workers reduce daily hours by two. This comes as Japan’s birth rate hit another record low with just 339,280 births in the first half of 2024 – about 10,000 fewer than the same period last year. Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike announced the changes in December 2024, stating the goal is to prevent women from sacrificing careers due to childbirth. Japan’s fertility rate stands at just 1.2 nationally and an alarming 0.99 in Tokyo, far below the 2.1 needed for population stability. The country’s median age is 49.9, making it the world’s oldest population.
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Desperate Times, Desperate Measures
Look, Japan has been throwing everything at this problem for decades. Since the 1990s, they’ve offered generous parental leave, daycare subsidies, and even cash payments to parents. Earlier this year, Tokyo launched its own government dating app. And yet the birth rate has fallen consistently for eight straight years. So now we’re at the four-day work week experiment.
Here’s the thing: Japan’s work culture is notoriously brutal, and it disproportionately affects women. The International Monetary Fund found Japanese women do five times more unpaid work like childcare and housework than men. More than half of women who had fewer children than they wanted cited increased housework as the reason. So theoretically, giving people an extra day off could help rebalance domestic labor.
But Will It Actually Work?
There’s some promising data. A global four-day week trial found men spent 22% more time on childcare and 23% more on housework when they had that extra day. And productivity and well-being generally improve with shorter weeks, according to workplace experts.
But let’s be real – this is a government pilot program affecting maybe 40,000 people in a country of 125 million. The private sector isn’t required to follow suit. And Japan’s corporate culture is famously resistant to change. Remember, this is the country that invented “karoshi” – death from overwork.
The Bigger Picture
Japan isn’t alone in this crisis. By 2100, 97% of countries are predicted to be below replacement fertility levels. South Korea’s fertility rate is even lower than Japan’s. Elon Musk keeps warning about population collapse. But is a four-day work week really the magic bullet?
Some experts are skeptical. As one workplace consultant told Fortune, you can’t assume one solution fits all industries and countries. And let’s be honest – if decades of parental benefits, cash incentives, and now government-run dating apps haven’t moved the needle, will an extra day off really convince people to have more kids?
Basically, Tokyo’s experiment is worth watching. But solving a demographic crisis of this scale will require way more than just giving government workers Fridays off. It needs a fundamental rewiring of how Japanese society thinks about work, family, and gender roles. And that doesn’t happen in a single policy announcement.
