The level of service you get, for the most part, is only true in the service industry. The people complaining about the working culture are usually in educatio

The level of service you get, for the most part, is only true in the service industry. The people complaining about the working culture are usually in education, recruiting, or tech (because those are predominately the jobs you can get easily as a foreigner without really strong Japanese skills). The working culture in Japanese white-collar jobs is legitimately bad. Japanese people agree, the government agrees, and there's been a trend working on fixing it. The major issues are excessive overtime, and unpaid overtime. The latter is technically illegal, but most companies avoid this by making most employees "supervisors". The government now requires companies to track overtime, and will publicly shame companies that have workers that work >45 hours of overtime a month. The legal cap is 100 hours a month. The overtime work culture doesn't improve anything. For the most part, people aren't actually working most of that time, and almost everyone is burned out. Productivity is very, very low. I think a lot of folks also complain about the senpai/kohai aspect of working in Japan, but to be honest, I haven't experienced this, since most tech companies here don't follow that quite as much as you'd expect, since there's so many foreigners. This is maybe what you're trying to touch on in the quality of service. It's built on the idea of long-time mentorship, but you'd be surprised in that it probably doesn't work the way you assume. It's more of a hazing approach than anything else. The closest analogue that I can think of is the stereotype of interns in the fashion or journalism, where you'd assume they'd be getting training, and tasks related to their career, but instead they're the more senior people's "bitch". They clean toilets, fetch coffee, etc. After working for a year or so, they're given some basic tasks. Again, this isn't a healthy culture and doesn't lead to Japanese companies being actually better than companies in other cultures. Ultimately, people think that Japanese companies work well, but really most Japanese companies simply can't fail, and it's extremely difficult to compete with them. This is because there's really only a couple handfuls of massive companies, pretending they're thousands of small companies. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu. Startups are owned by these companies, and they prop up the new businesses by self-dealing. Western work culture is bad in different ways, but Japanese work culture is pretty universally known to be awful, and folks living here mostly put up with it because the rest of the culture makes up for it.