Rest Is Not a Reward: What 15 Years in Japan Taught Me About Women's Labor

Week 3 of the Women's History Month 2026 series: "Women Who Built AI: Reclaiming the Future We Were Written Out Of." A lighter week — a personal one. Before we get to the solutions chapter next week, I want to tell you something about what I've learned and why rest is the most radical act I know.

I moved to Japan over 25 years ago and returned to the US just over 8 years ago.

People ask me why — Americans especially, with a particular kind of incredulity, as though Japan were an exotic posting rather than a home. The answer is complicated enough that I usually give a short version and hold the rest for later. The short version is: Japan gave me something I didn't know I was looking for.

The longer version is what I want to tell you today.

What Japan Is Not

Let me begin with the myth, because the myth is the reason most people ask the question wrong.

Japan is not a country that has figured out rest. The Japanese concept of karoshi — death by overwork — is a recognized cause of death, a word that exists because the phenomenon was too common to describe any other way. The salaryman culture, the expectation of long hours as a signal of loyalty and commitment, the social norm of not leaving before your boss leaves — Japan has exported a form of work culture that is, in some ways, more punishing than the American hustle economy it gets contrasted with.

I am not here to tell you that Japan taught me to slow down by modeling slowness.

What Japan taught me is something more specific, and stranger, and more useful.

What Japan Actually Taught Me

Japan taught me to observe the gap between the official story and the lived one.

The official story of Japanese work culture is the karoshi story — the overwork, the exhaustion, the sacrifice. But living there, inside the texture of daily life, you encounter another story running parallel to it. The story of the aesthetics of ordinary moments. The tea that is prepared with the same attention whether or not anyone is watching. The garden that is raked in patterns that will be disturbed by the next rain. The meal that is presented as though the presentation is itself part of the meal.

The word is shokunin — the spirit of the craftsperson who gives full attention to every part of their work, not because someone is watching and not because it will be preserved but because full attention is what the work deserves.

I'm not romanticizing this. The culture that produced shokunin also produced karoshi. The same ethos of total commitment to work can manifest as artisan devotion or as dying at your desk. The question is who that devotion serves, and what it costs.

But there is something in the shokunin ethic that I have spent fifteen years trying to understand and apply to my own life. The idea that full presence is not a luxury. That the quality of attention you bring to a moment determines the quality of the moment. That the distinction between "rest" and "work" is less useful than the distinction between "full presence" and "going through the motions."

This is what I mean when I talk about rest as resistance.

The Labor No One Counts

Women's History Month is, in part, an accounting exercise.

Every year, we document what women have contributed — the intellectual labor, the creative labor, the political labor, the scientific labor — and we note, again, how much of it has been uncredited, unpaid, erased, or attributed to someone else. We name Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper and Katherine Johnson. We name Timnit Gebru and Joy Buolamwini. We count what was taken.

But there is a category of women's labor that is almost never counted in these reckonings.

The emotional labor. The relational labor. The labor of maintaining the conditions under which everyone else's work is possible. The labor of being the person who notices that someone in the room is struggling. The labor of translating between the people who speak the official language of power and the people who don't. The labor of staying, when leaving would be easier.

Women have been doing this labor since before any institution existed to fail to credit them for it. And in the AI age, this labor is being automated away, made invisible by systems that were not built to see it, or outsourced to the communities most harmed by the systems that don't count them.

I think about this labor constantly. Because I live with sickle cell disease — an invisible disability that my body negotiates every single day — and I have spent years learning to distinguish between the exhaustion of doing meaningful work and the exhaustion of doing work while my body is fighting itself, while my nervous system is managing pain that no one around me can see, while I am performing wellness for a world that does not accommodate people who are not well.

That performance is labor too. Women with chronic illness know this. Women of color know this. Women navigating multiple marginalizations simultaneously know this.

The question I keep returning to is: what would it mean to stop performing? Not to stop working. To stop performing.

The Retreats

About four years ago, I started organizing retreats in Japan. Small groups. Curated. Built around a specific premise: rest is not a reward you earn when the work is done. Rest is a requirement for doing the work at all. And for women who have been taught — by their industries, their families, their cultures, their own internalized urgency — that rest is a luxury, a weakness, or a thing you get to do after you've proved your value, the act of resting deliberately is not passive.

It is radical.

I call them Rest as Resistance retreats, and the name is not hyperbole. When a Black woman executive who has spent twenty years in an institution that never saw her as its intended inhabitant sits down by a garden in Kyoto and realizes — physically realizes, in her body — that she is allowed to stop, that is a form of resistance. It is resistance against the system that told her she had to be always available, always performing, always proving her right to be there.

I have watched this happen. Multiple times. Every time it moves me.

What Japan provides for these retreats is not an ideology. It is a context. A context in which the quality of attention given to ordinary things — a meal, a garden, a silence — is legible as meaningful. A context in which rest is not coded as laziness but as preparation. A context that offers, for women who have spent their careers in cultures that extract everything and restore nothing, a different grammar for what they are allowed to be.

What This Has to Do With AI

Everything.

The AI systems that are being built right now — the ones that allocate healthcare resources, make hiring decisions, assess credit risk, route benefits, generate the outputs that are shaping how institutions interact with the most vulnerable people in their communities — those systems were built by people who were not resting.

They were built in sprint cycles. Under investor pressure. By teams that were under-resourced and overextended. By organizations where the people who would have noticed the missing voices, the absent communities, the labor no one counted — those people were too burned out, too coded out, or too precarious in their own positions to stop the process and say: wait. Who is not in this room?

I am not saying that rested people build perfect AI. I am saying that the culture of urgency that dominates the AI industry is the same culture that produces the exclusions I write about in this series. The same speed that produces systems that don't see Black faces accurately also produces teams that don't notice what they can't see. The same extraction logic that doesn't count women's relational labor also doesn't count the communities that AI systems will harm.

Rest is not separate from the AI governance work. It is upstream of it.

You cannot build a system that sees people if you are moving too fast to see them. You cannot build technology that honors human complexity if your development culture treats human complexity as a slowdown rather than a requirement. You cannot close the gap between the systems that code people out and the systems that code people in if the people doing the building are themselves running on empty.

This is what I mean when I say rest is resistance. Not just for the women on my retreats. For the organizations that need to build differently. For the industry that cannot afford to keep losing the people who know what's missing.

What I Have Learned

Fifteen years in Japan has taught me that the most subversive thing I can do — as a Black queer woman, as a Togolese immigrant, as a transracial adoptee, as someone whose body requires her to pay attention whether she wants to or not — is to insist on my own full presence.

Not the performed presence. Not the "I'm fine, I'm professional, I'm productive, I'm proving my right to be here" presence.

The actual one. The one that notices when something is wrong with a system before the system produces a crisis. The one that knows what's missing from a room because I have been what's missing from rooms. The one that sees the labor no one is counting because I have done the labor no one counted.

That presence is not a personal luxury. It is what I bring to the work.

And it requires rest.

Not the rest you earn. The rest you take because you are a human being and your humanity is not contingent on your productivity. The rest that is, as the women on my retreats discover, not an end to the work but the only way the work continues.

Next Week

Next week, we close the two-month arc — Black History Month and Women's History Month together — with the solutions chapter. The business case for what happens when women, and especially women of color, lead the rebuild of AI.

The through-line of this entire series has been consistent: the people most coded out of AI are the people most essential to getting it right.

This week was about why they need to rest first.

If This Resonated

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Dr. Dédé Tetsubayashi is a Black, queer, first-generation Togolese immigrant and transracial adoptee living with sickle cell disease. She spent over 15 years living in Japan before returning to the US. She is a TEDx speaker, global advisor on AI governance and inclusive technology, and the organizer of Rest as Resistance retreats.

This is Week 3 of the Women's History Month 2026 series: "Women Who Built AI: Reclaiming the Future We Were Written Out Of." Read Week 1: "The Women Who Built AI" and Week 2: "The Connection Architects".