While I don't actually live in Japan right now, I can guarantee you that the majority of time people spend at the office in Japan is not actual productive work

While I don't actually live in Japan right now, I can guarantee you that the majority of time people spend at the office in Japan is not actual productive work time (though you could maybe say the same about white collar jobs like software engineering in the US). While anecdotal, I visit relatively often, and every time I talk to friends at various types of companies in Japan (ex. an investment/securities trading firm, nikon, etc) about how work life is there, the complaints I hear the most are really just related to what has become ingrained in the work culture there. Things like: - Not leaving before your boss leaves - Going to after-work functions that are optional, but not really - Constantly maintaining the appearance of working hard by working long hours - Lots of top-down bullying (ex. some manager asking a subordinate to completely redo some report for no reason other than to make them work) - Lack of overtime pay from companies (if companies were properly paying overtime, they'd be in a hurry to increase productivity, not time spent at the office) There are many more things like this that are just a part of the culture, that everyone has just accepted. Recent explosion of startup culture (and startups) in Japan is changing this, though, slowly and surely. Foreign companies in Japan already have good reputations for having great work/life balance because our normal work culture is so much more lax. Another anecdotal but more specific example is a japanese friend that I know working in NYC -- this friend works for a Japanese company that has essentially replicated a lot of the bad parts of the culture they have there here, in the foreign office. This friend knows that just about any other business in the same sector (that wasn't a japanese subsidiary) would be way better.