I’d still likely take the option, I just think it’s unnecessary. Productivity is ridiculously up since the 8 hour day was established, even since just two decades ago.

Tasks expand to take up the available time, even if usefulness doesn’t.

I suspect you’d see little loss in cutting down to 32/hr/week, and I suspect it would be more than made up for by the gains of giving people that extra day. So it may be a net positive.

I guess my main concern is that a lot of companies (not speaking about Japan here, just the US) might decide to use four days a week as a way to make people crunch four days thinking that having three days off would make up for that. And things wouldn’t really be any better.