In South Africa you are legally entitled to 3 weeks a year of paid vacation (annual leave), which translates to 15 working days if you work 5 days a week. Your employer may legally reject any requests for paid vacation time and tell you when you're allowed to take your vacation (or even force you to take it at a certain time), although exercising that right may not always be wise.
If your employer keeps rejecting your requests for taking leave for a certain period (not going into the details, let's pretend it's a simple rule of 6 months), you are entitled to take the leave without their permission.
The vacation time doesn't have to be taken consecutively - 3 weeks is just a general way of saying 15 working days. If your normal working week is 6 days, you'd have 18 working days of annual leave.
Now's your turn to treat us like space aliens. How does it work in Japan?
Slacker Americans who insist on actually using the time the contract gives them might receive, say, 14 days off in an April to April fiscal year, in addition to public holidays (which are roughly as numerous as they are in the US, but not on the same days -- people work on Christmas and get off on the emperor's birthday, for example). While it is very much not the normal practice, I have special permission from my bosses to be allowed to take the majority of my days off at Christmas so that I can travel home and see my family.
The contract also allows for sick days, bereavement days (1 day for a child/sibling/spouse, 2 days for a parent -- I'm just reporting), and days off for weddings and childbirth. These are, ahem, not utilized to their fullest extent. In practice, the only sick leave I have ever seen taken at my company involved a) a nervous breakdown and b) chemotherapy for metastatizing bone cancer. (He got better... and came back to work!) Our best engineer came in the day after his mother died (although my boss tried to send him home).
Unused leave of the first kind accumulates, which results in older employees in my company having literally months of it sitting around. They will likely never use it, and they'll lose it when they separate from the company. Japanese law specifically forbids you from paying people for unused leave because the government thought companies would force people to work until they dropped, then take the payout.
We're very slowly getting better about this. There is at least one twenty-something male at my company other than me who actually takes all his vacation days every year. (He also left at 5:30 for much of my first year at the company... and stopped after he was informed that, quote, he was less Japanese than Patrick is.)
In a lot of small/middle sized companies, you officially have paid vacation but it's badly looked upon to actually take them. It's the same as being the first one out of the office at the official ending time...
In bigger multinationals like Sharp, it's a bit different. Some employees sued them over this a few years back, so now employees are forced to take their annual paid vacations.
Of course, as foreigners you're allowed and supposed to be a bit lazy/eccentric/quirky so you can take day off more easily (plus they understand the argument of taking days off to go see your family)
If your employer keeps rejecting your requests for taking leave for a certain period (not going into the details, let's pretend it's a simple rule of 6 months), you are entitled to take the leave without their permission.
The vacation time doesn't have to be taken consecutively - 3 weeks is just a general way of saying 15 working days. If your normal working week is 6 days, you'd have 18 working days of annual leave.
Now's your turn to treat us like space aliens. How does it work in Japan?