The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has relaxed its summer dress code to permit shorts, along with polo shirts, T-shirts and sneakers, for staff whose roles allow it. The change applies to the metropolitan government's own employees rather than to Japanese workplaces generally, and it has produced a public argument that is partly about clothing and mostly about heat.
Cool Biz, twenty years on
The policy extends a campaign with a long history. Cool Biz was launched by the environment ministry in 2005, under then-minister Yuriko Koike, who is now Tokyo's governor. It asked offices to set air conditioning no lower than 28C and told staff they could drop the tie and jacket, which in Japanese office practice was a substantive change rather than a cosmetic one.
It worked, at least at first. Government figures credited the first summer with saving on the order of hundreds of millions of kilowatt-hours, and adoption was rapid: within a year a large share of offices had raised their thermostat settings and public recognition of the campaign was close to universal.
Allowing shorts is the same logic pushed further. If the building is warmer by design, what staff can wear has to move with it.
The heat
The context is not symbolic. Japanese summers have become materially more dangerous. Heatstroke hospitalizations have run into the tens of thousands annually in recent years, with 2025 among the worst on record, and workplace heatstroke cases reached a record 1,803 that year, Japan Today reported. Deaths attributed to heat have run into the thousands annually.
There is an energy dimension as well. Japan imports the overwhelming majority of its crude oil from the Middle East, most of it transiting the Strait of Hormuz, and the current conflict there has made electricity costs a live political question. Reducing cooling demand is not only an environmental preference this summer.
The objections
The resistance is real and worth taking seriously rather than treating as fussiness.
Japanese business dress carries meaning about seriousness and respect for the counterparty, particularly in client-facing work, and the objection is that shorts read as leisure wear in a setting where the signal matters. A 52-year-old realtor quoted in coverage of the change said she associates shorts with a day off. Others online have been blunter about not wanting to look at colleagues' legs.
There is also a practical complaint that the guidance is vague. "Shorts" covers a wide range, and without a shared standard for length or formality the policy pushes an awkward judgment onto individual employees, which in a consensus-oriented office culture is its own kind of burden.
Supporters make the straightforward case: the heat is dangerous, the buildings are deliberately warmer, and a dress code designed for a cooler climate and a cooler office is not worth defending on grounds of custom alone.
What it signals
The metropolitan government is a large and visible employer, and Cool Biz demonstrated that a government adopting a norm can shift private-sector practice faster than regulation would. Whether shorts follow the same path is an open question; the tie and jacket were subtractions, while shorts are a substitution, and the latter asks more of a workplace's sense of itself.
What is not in question is the pressure producing the change. Tokyo is adapting its working day to summers that are hotter than the ones its office conventions were built for, alongside earlier start times and wider remote work. The clothing is the visible part of a larger adjustment.
