A JAPANESE company has issued a televised apology to customers for a “scandal” in which an employee was caught taking three-minute lunch breaks on company time.

Executives from the Kobe City Waterworks Bureau on the outskirts of Osaka fronted the media on Friday to reveal the 64-year-old employee had made an occasional habit of walking across the street for his bento box.

“It’s immensely regrettable that such a scandal took place, and we wish to express our sincere apologies,” a company executive told a media conference, the Asahi Broadcasting Corporation reported.

The worker was caught out when he was seen leaving the building and crossing the street to go into the restaurant. He reportedly took 26 trips to the bento box store between September 2017 and March 2018, equating to 78 minutes away from his desk during the seven-month period.

He told his superiors he occasionally left the building “for a change of pace”. The Kobe City Waterworks Bureau docked the man half a day’s pay over the “scandal”, which reignited debate over the country’s intense work culture.

On social media, many came to the man’s defence. “Are people not even allowed to go to the toilet now? This is like workplace slavery or something,” one Twitter user wrote, according to local website Sora News 24.

“The punishment is totally absurd — 26 times over a six-month period means he only left the office once a week,” another wrote.

One person described the scenes as “absolutely ridiculous”. “Arranging this formal apology with the press would’ve wasted more time than the three minutes he spent buying his lunch every now and then,” they wrote.

According to a 2016 government survey, nearly one quarter of Japanese companies require employees to work at least 80 hours of often unpaid overtime a month.

But while the country has among the longest working hours in the world, it has the lowest productivity out of the G7 nations. A number of high-profile cases of “karoshi”, or “death by overwork”, have forced the government to attempt to address the issue.

In 2015, an employee of advertising firm Dentsu jumped to her death after reportedly being forced to work 100 hours of overtime a month. Two years earlier, a reporter with national broadcaster NHK died of heart failure after working 159 hours of overtime.

Originally published as Three-minute lunch break ‘scandal’