so its absolutely no secret that a solid chunk of Saihate Station is made up of commentary on work culture and all the ways its toxic and exploitative (shitty management, overtime, bad pay, taking work home, pitting employees against each other, the list goes on), and in a previous post I said I might ramble about it a bit.
Haru is a character who is repeatedly shown to be utterly incompetent at work, and this is something others consistently look down on him for. Even when Tatsunami is still in his 'shower Haru with love and compliments' phase early on in the game, he doesn't try to play up Haru's skills at work, but tells him outright that Haru's job isn't right for him. We see via flashbacks that other characters such as the manager and their coworkers view Haru's struggles at work as an indication that he is incompetent in other aspects of his life as well and that he's just an all-around useless person (something which Haru himself believes as well).
However, we also see and hear from Haru multiple times that he takes good care of his home life and has some decent amount of domestic skill (i.e. cooking). This to me is one of the more subtle commentaries on work culture in the game: Haru has things he's good at, but they aren't the "right" skills because they all fall into household duties rather than things you'd need to do in a 9-5. For a salaryman in a patriarchal capitalist society, a man with domestic skills but no work skills may as well have no skills at all, and so Haru is still worth practically nothing to those around him despite not being as incompetent as he is perceived.
Then you have Tatsunami: master's degree, model employee, put-together appearance, works overtime and then takes work home with a smile. We know that he has far surpassed Haru at their workplace despite being there for two months less than him, and we see very clearly via flashback and exposition that Tatsunami is well-liked by their coworkers and manager. Haru goes as far as to admit that he hadn't viewed Tatsunami as human, but as "someone who's perfect at everything". And it certainly seems that way from how Tatsunami is presented. Hell, the first time he's on screen, Haru gives us a nice long and self-deprecating narration about how great Tatsunami is and how much he sucks by comparison. Until we see Tatsunami's apartment.
Probably not the place most people would picture when asked to imagine such an excellent person's home.
Tatsunami also can't cook for shit, and I promise i'm not just bringing this up be mean. It's the fact that both Haru and Tatsunami have clear strengths and weaknesses, Haru's weaknesses being in the workplace and Tatsunami's in the home, but one is held in such higher regard than the other simply because Tatsunami's skills can be exploited at their job and Haru's can't. Not every person on planet earth was put here to work a corporate 9-5, but with the way their manager and coworkers act, you'd think it was some terrible moral failing to be anything but a diligent salaryman that lets himself be exploited. Haru has internalized the notion that 'success' in life is solely measured by the job you work and this is one of the driving forces behind the deep insecurity that dominates his character.
I don't really know how to conclude this but given the terrible work culture both in Japan and elsewhere worldwide (and how its getting worse), I've been very interested in Saihate Station's messages about work culture and what makes a person "valuable" to society (as well as to other individuals, but that's a conversation for another day).
