Japanese Twitter users are jealous of Christopher Robin’s soul-suckingly busy work schedule

The life of the stressed-out main character in the live-action Winnie the Pooh film is one of leisure compared to many Japanese adults’.

Hollywood movies are extremely popular in Japan, and usually play in theaters with their original English dialogue and Japanese subtitles. However, sometimes they’re marketed differently in Japan than they are in the U.S., such as when Big Hero 6 was renamed Baymax and focused more on the hugs than the action, or when Wonder Woman was promoted with a pop song claiming “a woman can’t sleep alone.”

In general, Japanese moviegoers have a stronger craving for catharsis, but that actually makes marketing the Winnie the Pooh pseudo-sequel Christopher Robin, which opened here last week, pretty easy. It’s a story of the titular character trying to recapture his lost sense of boyhood wonder as he deals with the intense pressure of a dreary office job, making it a simple, straightforward sell to dissatisfied Japanese salarymen and office ladies.

▼ Trailer for Pooh and Me as an Adult (Pooh to Otona ni Natta Boku), as Christopher Robin is titled in Japan

But while Japanese adults can easily sympathize with Christopher Robin’s melancholy, many of them are actually ruefully jealous of the specifics of his work/life balance, as shown in this observation from Japanese Twitter user @katatakoyaki.

“Just got back from seeing Christopher Robin. Everyone in the movie says the main character is a super hard-working wage slave and worries about him, with his wife saying ‘If you keep this up, it’ll break you,’ so I was shocked to see that he arrives home at 9 p.m.”

See, in Japan, if you finish work early enough that you don’t just clock out, but actually walk through the door of your home at 9 o’clock, you’re not going to get all that much sympathy from Japanese society at large. Sure, that’s a busy day, but lots of people in Japan who work in offices where the official quitting time is supposed to be 6 o’clock regularly do a couple hours of overtime. Add in an hour-long commute from the expensive city center out to the more affordable suburbs, and getting home at 9 is actually on the early side for a lot of Japanese businesspeople.

@katatakoyaki’s tweet elicited responses including:

“Getting home at 9 p.m.? Pretty normal.”
“Wait, doesn’t everybody work until 9 at night?”
“If Christopher Robin’s wife is worried about him, what about me? I work until 1:30 in the morning, get home and go to sleep at 2:30, and then get up at 4:30.”
“Japan’s workforce is already broken.”
“Having an emotional breakdown just because you didn’t get home until 9? That’s a lot softer than people in Japan who work until after midnight…it’s kind of weird that Japan is like that, though.”

“Watching the movie was a culture shock for me,” continued @katatakoyaki. So how much work does a fictional character have to do in order to be seen as obviously working extra-hard in Japan?

▼ “Ahhh! There’s nothing like a beer after working 20 hours straight!”

Granted, many of the commenters who pointed out that they weren’t shocked by Christopher Robin’s work schedule were also quick to point out that that’s more the result of Japanese companies’ unreasonable expectations than any sort of mental weakness on the part of the movie’s protagonists. Still, in a country where the lights of office high-rises stay on past midnight, there are probably a lot of people who’d like to trade places with him.

Source: Twitter/@katatakoyaki via Jin
Top image: YouTube/ディズニー公式



Credit:
at 10:41

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