[developerdanny]

This made me chuckle. Japan is the most unproductive Asian market of current times, because instead of working to get work done (ie being productive) they work to pretend to get work done. It's somewhat ironic that their culture of faking hard work, is actually killing people from overwork. I'm struggling to believe it.

[hrktb]

For me the better mental model is of ant societies, where some percent of the ants don’t do much while other work around the clock. People staying at their desks “for the show” are the “lazy” part, while other employees will do actual crazy hours partly compensating for the others.

More precisely, a lot of overworked people are doing part of the job of their manager who pressures them into doing it.

Also I don’t think that’s a purely japanese perspective, French people’s stereotype is laziness, yet the amount of burned out people is crazy high. And most countries will have their shares of people living a slow life, while others are overworked.

[microcolonel]

Well, they created a market driven society with low wealth inequality, that's what it looks like. I find it hilarious that people basically end up describing Japan when they list off the things they wish the U.S. or Canada were, but then they complain about the fairly obvious downsides of that.