There are colleagues in London, New York and Brussels who will shudder at this disclosure, but 66 per cent of the three men in the Tokyo bureau are currently wearing shorts. In the office. In meetings. In bare-kneed professionalism. The existence of the one office hold-out is important. His perseverance serves as a reminder that the brainwashing powers of the trouser cult remain strong and, incredibly, that the shorts debate is far from settled. That is possibly because the pro-shorts lobby has historically done such
a poor job of championing the male lower leg. Better branding would help: We are not shorts-wearers, for a start, but shin-maxxers. There are, alas, ever fewer places on Earth where the acceptability of shorts in a white-collar context should really be in question. Summers are more dangerously vehement than in the past, with record-breaking temperatures in western Europe this week. Suit-wearers (as a generalised decision-making genus) are looking less plausibly committed to longer-term climate solutions (beyond turning up the air-conditioning) than they did a
few years ago. But in Tokyo, particularly, the debate has lurched surprisingly liberal, after a succession of scorching summers have combined with fears over the cost of air-conditioning as the Iran war sends Japan’s energy bills soaring. Yuriko Koike was Minister of the Environment in 2005 when Japan launched its Cool Biz campaign – a permission slip that allowed Japanese men, conditioned to fastidious suit-wearing, to remove their ties and jackets and liberalise the strict white-collar dress code. The idea, which basically worked, was that
if people dressed more realistically for aggressive heat, air-conditioning would be required to do slightly less. Cool Biz only went so far though: Sartorial conservatism persisted and shorts remained in the closet. But in her current role as governor of Tokyo, Koike has lifted the final taboo, portentously calling for nothing less than a “change of mindset”. Male employees of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) have been told they can work in shorts, and Koike has said she hopes businesses will follow them down that
same path. A short video, released by TMG in April to show how smoothly Japan can survive this upheaval, presents viewers with a scene of office harmony, with shorts-wearing male bureaucrats working alongside unfazed female colleagues. “It’s not just about clothing, it’s about re-evaluating your whole lifestyle. It makes one think about things more broadmindedly,” says one of the men with the zeal of the just-baptised. Beyond this fantasy tableau, however, the case for shorts has not yet been won. Tokyo’s financial district has not
visibly converted. Even sources at TMG say they haven’t spotted many shorts in the building. And there may be a sense of public-spiritedness behind the reluctance: Vox pop interviews by Japanese media have produced extensive variations on the word “ugh!” from women who, it seems pretty clear, really don’t want to see their male colleagues’ legs. But Koike is right. This is about a change in mindset, not trouser length. Permission to wear shorts has been granted in a country whose Meteorological Agency recently introduced
a new “cruel heat” rating in preparation for a near future where days above 40 deg C become more commonplace. But the necessity for mindset change is global. We are in collective trouble and, when it comes to conventions around the cultural importance of bits of cloth, the tyranny of precedent is not our friend. There are two serious arguments for shorts, the first, practical. We are in the foothills of an era of “heatflation”, where the costs of mitigating rising temperatures through technology or
more basic measures begin to rise steadily as an unavoidable cost of living. The point will come – it may in fact already be here – where shorts in the office are just viewed as yet another cost-effective heatflation mitigator. The second argument is more abstract and arises from the ever-heavier duty of honesty and resistance in the face of proactive dishonesty – not just climate change denial, but in the day-to-day gaslighting of serious debate. Shorts-wearing may seem a trivial way to make a
stand. Long trousers, though, are sweaty enablers of a pretence that our world is not changing. Wearing them, in hot summers, requires either dangerous perseverance or consumption of energy in a way that ultimately makes the problem worse. FINANCIAL TIMES
Tokyo, Yuriko Koike, Cool Biz, shorts at work, dress code, air-conditioning costs, heatflation, cruel heat rating, TMG