In February, Tokyo-based public relations firm Sunny Side Up announced employees could leave work early on the last Friday of every month.

The problem? Nobody wanted to go. Despite the company’s announcement, it seemed like everyone would stay at their desks anyway.

“It is not the Japanese way,” explains Ryuta Hattori, head of the company’s global communications department. “In the Japanese working culture, we work so hard and work so many hours and nobody takes off early. ”

The idea is part of a new Japanese government initative, launched on 24 February, designed to tackle the country’s infamous culture of long hours and overwork. Once a month on Premium Friday, as it’s known, employees are encouraged to leave work at 15:00 in the hopes some free time will reduce workplace stress. It’s turned out to be more difficult than it sounds.

At Hattori’s company, where the corporate slogan is ‘let’s have fun,’ incentives were needed to push workers out the door. “We had to give them bonuses,” he says.

Any employee who agreed to leave their desk at 15:00 on Premium Friday received envelopes with 3,200 yen, or $28. Some of them headed to an izakaya, a Japanese-style pub that also serves small plates of food, while others went off to play football.

Still, many people at other companies remain unsure about logging off prematurely. While cutting out early might sound like a glorious plan to workers in other countries, in Japan the Premium Friday initiative has been met with trepidation. The country’s hopes of easing an overworked population has instead only seemed to highlight what can happen when workers are pushed too far.

First, the boss

Late on a Tuesday afternoon, Gian Nomachi pushed a cart full of empty bento boxes outside a medical research park in Japan’s Hyōgo Prefecture. She delivers the lunches; because workers leave their desks for meals.

“I would like to take part in Premium Friday, but there is no way,” Nomachi, 26, said as she stacked the colourful boxes in the back of the van. “This is impossible. It is impossible to leave work early.”

Maybe she would if her boss took part, she says. But until that happens, no worker would dare to be the first to check out.

That’s a typical outlook in Japan, a country where workers rack up long days with or without being paid overtime, says Parissa Haghirian, professor of Japanese management at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Partly it’s due to a worker shortage, so everyone is overworked, Haghirian says. “There’s a very practical reason why Japanese work so long… there’s not enough people to do all the work,” Haghirian says. “In a company where there isn’t enough people, you can’t say some should go home early because you wouldn’t have enough people to complete tasks.”

But Japan’s hard-working culture has also reached crisis levels, causing the government to act. A series of deaths linked to working too hard, called karōshi in Japanese, brought the notorious Japanese obsession with work into the spotlight.

One high-profile example was the suicide of Matsuri Takahashi, a 24-year-old ad executive who leapt to her death on Christmas Day in 2015. She had been working a 100-plus hours a month in overtime and left a note for her mother that read: “Why do things have to be so hard?”

She was one of 2,159 workers that year whose deaths or suicides were ruled to have been caused by overworking. In October, the government released a report that showed a quarter of companies had workers clocking 80 hours or more of overtime a month.

In response, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sought ways to lighten the country’s workload, including encouraging workers to take part in Premium Friday starting in February.

Two Premium Fridays later, and few companies had taken part. Last month, Premium Friday landed right in the middle of cherry blossom season, a springtime ritual when locals and tourists head to parks and temples to spot the pink flowering trees. But, it was also the last day of the Japanese fiscal year, meaning many companies were too busy to let employees leave.

The social pressure to remain at your desk as long as a colleague is still there, means people often stay late into the night. And that’s unlikely to change even with the Premium Friday encouragement.