[yongjik]

I grew up in South Korea. Believe me, South Korean working condition sucks. As of 2013, South Koreans work 2163 hours per year on average, topped only by Mexico (2237) among OECD countries [1].

For comparison, Japan has 1735 hours, US has 1788, and Germany has 1388 hours.

As for the "success", well, somehow South Korea has experienced near-miraculous economic development during the 70s. Unfortunately, somehow we forgot to understand that economic development is a means of attaining better life: it became an end in itself. We can still find lots of people saying "Vacation? What vacation? How can we become a developed country (like the US or Japan) when we get all the same vacation as they do?"

Argh.

Edit: For extra craziness, replace "vacation" by "weekend". (Not unheard of.)

[1] http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS

[kyllo]

Yeah I think that attitude partly comes from the cultural idea that once you have children, you're supposed to sacrifice everything for their future (financial) prosperity. So there's an extremely high emphasis on education. The idea seems to be, work as much as possible and make your kids study as much as possible so that they can get into the best schools, and so that you can afford to pay for it. But the result is that the adults are so busy working and the kids so busy studying, that they don't spend nearly enough time together. There is no time left to enjoy each other's company, or enjoy life itself. It's just an endless grind.