Japanese PM's sleep revelation sparks concern

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has sparked a national concern after revealing her minimal sleep schedule since taking office.In a tweet about how she spent a public holiday weekend, the prime minister wrote that she managed to have "five full hours of sleep for the first time in ages".Ms Takaichi said that was an improvement from her usual "zero to three hours" per night. "On weekdays, by the time I get back to the residence, I'm maxed out on private time just handling bath cleaning, bathing, dinner, washing up afterward, laundry, and some light tidying," she wrote."So the late-night hours after that get consumed until dawn with reading materials brought back from the Prime Minister's Office or prepping for … question time."Ms Takaichi said the remainder of her free time was taken up by ironing handkerchiefs, getting on top of laundry and repairing clothing.Sanae Takaichi said she often worked until dawn. (Reuters: Hollie Adams)What may have been a lighthearted tweet about the pressures of being a nation's leader has startled Japanese citizens and set off a national debate about the hazards of lack of sleep in the top job."I think she should rest more," Democratic Party for the People leader Yuichiro Tamaki said in a news conference."Why doesn't her entourage provide more support to create an environment in which she can make important decisions with a fresh mind?"But some of Ms Takaichi's colleagues have come to her defence."Each person has their own various circumstances and behind-the-scenes stories, and on the premise of fulfilling responsibilities in public duties, I would be grateful if you could understand," deputy foreign affairs minister Ayano Kunimitsu wrote on X.Culture of long work hoursLong working hours are the norm for corporate Japan, where white-collar workers — "salarymen" — often rack up to 12 hours of work per day.This type of gruelling schedule and the extreme consequences of burnout that come with it led to the coining of the word "karoshi", which means "death by overwork".Official figures show that hundreds of people die every year in Japan from strokes, heart attacks, or by taking their own lives as a result of overwork.Reform came in 2022 after a doctor took his own life.Ms Takaichi has faced criticism in the past for summoning her aides at 3am for meetings.When she became prime minister Ms Takaichi announced she would scrap her work-life balance and "work, work, work, work, work".Effects of sleep deprivationQueensland Brain Institute researcher Bruno van Swinderen said a person keeping the hours Ms Takaichi described would be extremely sleep deprived."She must feel miserable," the University of Queensland professor said."When a brain has accrued an enormous amount of sleep debt, the first thing it wants to do is go into deep, slow wave sleep that repairs the brain, so I'm guessing that her brain is going straight into that."So then she is not taking care of another key function of sleep, which is the rapid eye movement sleep which affects emotional regulation and also cognitive flexibility."Dr van Swinderen said it was important to get enough of both kinds of sleep in order to maintain general health. "It's particularly concerning for a leader of a country, because you want to be emotionally regulated and have cognitive flexibility," he said."I suspect most leaders around the world, starting with the US, are probably getting very little REM sleep and are not thinking about their sleep health in the way they should be."Ms Takaichi is not the first world leader whose poor sleep habits have drawn attention. Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher got as little as four hours sleep a night, according to the BBC.French President Emannuel Macron is known to get four to five hours per night and has a tendency to fire off messages to colleagues in the early hours of the morning, according to French media. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel called herself the "sleep camel" in reference to her time in office, when she would get about four hours of sleep a night.