A very good description! I wanted to add a few things that I noticed to balance off what you said. For context I did a 2 month internship at a Japanese company

A very good description! I wanted to add a few things that I noticed to balance off what you said. For context I did a 2 month internship at a Japanese company near Tokyo ( a major multinational, very very salaryman-oriented). I'm clearly not at informed as you, but I think it will be useful. 1 - Management was very very good. It was a little rigid at times, but everything was well organized and I had no complaints. Some things like bells for the start of the work day, start of lunch, end of lunch... were a little eerie at first, but once you got used to it, it was actually fine. 2 - The company is mother the company is father. You're absolutely right that the company takes care of you. It's sorta like a family - though an awkward family. Awkward in part because you have an employer-employee relationship and also because Japanese people are a little more awkward (especially tech people). Anytime someone is transferred or hired in your division (about once every two weeks) you all go out to drink/dinner/karaoke together. It wasn't anything too crazy, but it was generally a really nice restaurant every time and there was a special company account that pays for it. It never felt like the company was being stingy with you (though we didn't have very top of the line hardware to work on...) One time I had some miscommunication about when I was coming back from a short break and my boss was honestly concerned, some phone calls were made to the hotel etc. etc. They really do care about their employees. 3 - You aren't stuck doing the same job till you die. People are constantly shuttled around internally. I think on average people were moved every two years. If you didn't work hard, you could get transferred to a crappy job. If you did really well, you would have say in where you were transferred. In fact since no one is fired the way they squeeze you out is by constantly reassigning you and giving you crappy positions. 4 – For historic reasons people ended up working insane hours. 12 hours days are the norm for a lot of people... But strangely enough there wasn't any explicit requirement to work that long, and it wasn’t really rewarded. In fact the company was pretty concerned about it and was trying to get people to go home earlier. Wednesdays you were explicitly forbidden from working more than 8 hours. Strangely on the whole people didn't see to be in a rush to go see their families, and to be honest the men didn't seem very close to their families. I only saw one guy who worked 8hrs/day every day. No one gave him shit though 5 - US multinationals are on the scene and are causing major changes. I talked to a girl working a Oracle in Japan and she said that there are many new "hybrid" companies that have elements of US and Japanese management. It seemed that they were very successful. The Japanese management style has a lot of good elements, and the US system has a lot of problems. I could see the right mix being great.