The Japanese insistence on working 80 hours a week is also doing much to kill marriage, and families for that matter. You can't have a successful marriage when

The Japanese insistence on working 80 hours a week is also doing much to kill marriage, and families for that matter. You can't have a successful marriage when you're at work or at a (mandatory) after-work drinking session with your idiot and over-the-hill boss. I'm not convinced the government can do much about this either, since it certainly isn't a matter of legislation or enforcement and labor protection is (or can be) quite strong in Japan. Rather the Japanese will typically voluntarily submit to these awful practices. When the government fact-finding commission tasked with finding out why Japanese will take on onerous working hours when they are often encouraged not to, itself wound up working people 80+ hours each week, what can you possibly do? I love it here and I'm not going anywhere, but this is not a problem with any clear solution. And if its impact on marriage is as large as I suspect, marriages aren't going to get any healthier soon, either.