“Lying around, sort of sleeping, sometimes not sleeping, is more of a hobby,” Steger explained. A Cultural Relationship With SleepĪpparently, when Westerners teaching English in Japan ask students about their hobbies, they get surprised by one, fairly common answer: sleep. Today, people of all classes do it without giving much thought to its socioeconomic implications. By the 1990s, Steger said, consumer spending was a bygone concern for Japan’s thriving economy, and goro goro had lost its reputation as a low-income pastime. In time, Japan came around to the same “work hard, play hard” ethos embraced on the other side of the Pacific. “So they promoted consumer culture rather than sleeping in,” Steger said. In the 1970s, Steger explained, goro goro became an activity associated with Japan’s working poor, who couldn’t afford a pricier hobby than lying around, doing nothing.ĭuring this period, Japan was seen as having weaker consumer spending than the US and Europe - and this was thought to hold the country back economically. “It has to do with working hours, which were more strictly separated from leisure.” “It’s the bourgeoisie’s way of having sleep in a private place,” Steger said. In America, by contrast, we set strict boundaries between work and leisure, including in the design and use of space in our homes.ĭifferentiating between our sleeping and waking lives is a relatively recent development - it emerged in Europe and America during the Industrial Revolution, but didn’t become the norm everywhere.
Many families sit around on soft flooring, where they eat as well as enjoy repose. Goro goro mirrors the architecture of the Japanese household, where the sleeping and living areas aren’t fully separate. And people practice goro goro at all times of day, typically while wearing pajamas and lying on a type of grass flooring called a tatami mat. While someone might sleep in to catch up on Zzzs, goro goro is more about dozing off or lazing about in the space between wakefulness and rest. Steger explained that goro goro isn’t quite the same thing as “sleeping in,” at least not in the clear-cut way that Americans understand it. To find out if I was onto something, I reached out to Brigitte Steger, a senior lecturer in modern Japanese studies at the University of Cambridge who’s researched sleeping habits in Japan. Maybe it’s only we industrious Americans who judge late-risers? Merely knowing that sleeping in was a recognized cultural phenomenon made me feel better about clocking extra hours in bed. When I heard the term, I felt a toe-curling warmth. (It’s also the word for the sound of a cat purring.) Recently after, a friend who went to college in Tokyo taught me about “goro goro,” the Japanese tradition of rolling around and luxuriating in bed. But, when I got a full-time job with a flexible schedule, I lost control over my shuteye. Back when I was a full-time freelancer, I’d get up each morning with a rush of adrenaline, often before my alarm. My struggle with rising on time is the definition of a first-world problem. I stopped using my alarm altogether, rising whenever I felt damn-well ready - often an hour late. Then I began ignoring the piercing siren several times in a row as if it were a nagging mother who didn’t realize how quickly I could get ready.Įventually, I went rogue. At first, I’d hit the snooze button and linger in bed until the next alarm.
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