Relaxation for Sale to Stressed Japanese

TOKYO —  The trains in Tokyo stop running at midnight, it is said, only because Japanese workers need a mandatory time to start journeying home.

The average Japanese “salaryman” works 2,100 hours a year, compared to 1,900 hours for the American businessman and 1,600 for the German, according to Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry.

Japanese workers take much less time off every year than their American and German counterparts. Six-day workweeks are routine.

So it is perhaps natural in a high-tech country where money can buy virtually anything that an entire industry has emerged to sell one thing: relaxation. One company has even adapted methods that were developed to treat stressed-out U.S. Vietnam War veterans.

“It is only within the last five years that people here have been talking about stress,” counselor Masayoshi Hanami says. In recent months, the Japanese have been debating the scientific validity of a new, disturbing phenomenon--”death by overwork.”

Hanami sees about 400 clients a month, mostly women, at his clinic in Tokyo’s hectic Ginza shopping district. He offers a combination of biofeedback techniques and old-fashioned therapy.

“People come to talk,” he says. But if such therapy doesn’t help, Hanami places his clients in what he calls his “capsules.” Each capsule is essentially an armchair with a fancy hood, equipped with soft, New Age music interspersed with the sounds of breaking waves or chirping birds.

Wires run from a person’s fingertips and forehead to a computer, which monitors the pulse and the brain’s alpha waves, electrical rhythms associated with a state of wakeful relaxation. A readout of stress levels is displayed on a computer screen throughout the session.

“People are like balloons,” Hanami says. “If you put pressure on them, they explode. Japanese people now have a lot of stress from their way of life.” Job competition is extremely intense, and commuting averages two to three hours every day.

Many younger, trendier Japanese are turning to the Brain Mind Gym in Tokyo’s night-life district, Roppongi.

“Our customers enjoy their fast-paced lives, and they don’t want the excitement to stop,” says Takehiro Ohta, a company spokesman. “They just want to slow down every now and then.”

To do that, the gym provides special goggles that flash in sync with pulsating electronic music. The concept was developed about 20 years ago by an American researcher to soothe the shattered nerves of Vietnam veterans.

For a mental workout, gym members recline in soft leather chairs and cover themselves with blankets. The lights and music start throbbing slowly at first, then speed up to a dizzying velocity, forming patterns on the eyelids and creating an almost hypnotic state.

“The idea,” Ohta says, “is that stress comes from an imbalance between the right and left sides of the brain. The lights and music balance the brain.”

Most of the gym’s 3,300 members are men. The average customer is in his late 20s and visits three times a week for half-hour sessions.

“Tokyo moves very fast,” Ohta says. “It’s easy to lose yourself. This machine helps you find yourself. There is a lot of pressure now from technology. It is better to solve these problems with machines.”

Those who prefer a more traditional way of relaxing may drop by Sleep Culture Gallery Alpha, owned by a bed-linen manufacturer.

“We try to promote a deeper understanding of sleep,” spokeswoman Kazue Ishii says. “We feel people should sleep more.”

Ishii, 23, says the gallery attracts about 50 visitors a day, most of whom complain that they are overworked and can’t sleep well.