Tokyo's push for shorts at work sparks a hairy office debate
As Japan endures peak summer heat, Tokyo's Cool Biz campaign now includes shorts for male office workers, but the relaxed dress code has ignited "sunehara" debate over leg hair, grooming standards and gender double standards at work.
FASHION
7/30/20263 min read
It's peak summer in Japan, and Tokyo is giving its office workers a little more legroom. As temperatures across the country climb through their seasonal high, typically running from June into September, the metropolitan government is nudging employees out of suits and ties and into lighter gear: polo shirts, sneakers and, in the right setting, shorts.
The relaxed dress code is part of an expanded Cool Biz campaign, the decades-old push to keep workers comfortable while easing demand on air conditioning during Japan's hottest months. Gov. Yuriko Koike helped launch the original national version back in 2005, when the ask was simply to lose the jacket and tie during the hot season.
Twenty years on, the campaign has moved below the knee. The new guidance applies mainly to Tokyo Metropolitan Government staff rather than every employer in the city, though private companies have been encouraged to rethink their own summer dress codes, too. Shorts stay optional, and they're still a hard no for anyone headed into a formal meeting or facing the public. For desk-bound staff, though, it's a real break from Japan's buttoned-up business uniform of dark suits and long trousers.
Why now
The timing tracks this summer's weather. A July demonstration of the new dress code took place in roughly 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) heat with 72% humidity. The previous summer had already given Japan its hottest one since record-keeping began in 1898, sending more than 100,000 people to hospitals with heatstroke. City officials also frame the lighter wardrobe as an energy play: less need for aggressive air conditioning means lower electricity demand at a moment when fuel costs and energy supply are both under pressure.
Some employees have taken to it quickly. Public servant Toru Suda said his polo shirt, knee-length shorts and sneakers felt odd at first, then normal once enough colleagues joined in. Noboru Watanabe, who heads Tokyo's climate-change countermeasures team, swapped his trousers for khaki shorts and said the switch makes him feel younger and more approachable, though he still dresses formally when the occasion calls for it.
The pushback
Outside government offices, the reaction has been less breezy. Online, some commenters objected to seeing bare, hairy legs on male coworkers, a strain of commentary that picked up the nickname "sunehara," sometimes rendered in English as "shin harassment" or "leg hair harassment." It's social-media chatter more than an official workplace grievance or a settled view among Japanese women.
Sachie Koike, a 52-year-old realtor, told Agence France-Presse she thinks of shorts as leisurewear and doesn't see visible leg hair as particularly tidy for an office. Her comment captures the broader tug-of-war between comfort and long-standing ideas of what "professional" is supposed to look like.
Other critics are less focused on legs and more on double standards, pointing out that women are often still expected to wear stockings, long skirts or carefully done hair and makeup through the same humid summer. Professor Atsuko Tamada has argued that women already put in real time and money to meet grooming norms, so if men get license to bare more skin at work, similar expectations may follow for them, too. That framing has its own critics, who call it "lookism" and argue that body hair, age or build shouldn't decide whether an outfit counts as professional.
The disagreement has spilled into Japan's male grooming market, where clinics report growing interest in laser hair removal, some of it marketed as workplace etiquette rather than personal preference. A Gorilla Clinic survey found the country still split on the underlying question: 53.5% of respondents opposed shorts in the workplace, citing visible body hair and body shape among their concerns, while the remaining 46.5% were fine with it.
Tokyo's policy is a practical response to a brutal summer, not a mandate that every man show some knee. But the reaction says something about how fast a small wardrobe change can surface bigger arguments over gender, grooming and who actually gets to be comfortable at work.
Images: AFP | Iban Lopez Luna