MikeHattsu
Member
Uh... Aren't they breaking the law then? You're only allowed to work 28 hours a week if you're there on a student visa
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Japanese reporter died after clocking 159 hours of overtime
- Thread starter badboy78660
- Start date
Uh... Aren't they breaking the law then? You're only allowed to work 28 hours a week if you're there on a student visa
Bananajama
Banned
8:29 - 5:31
That's as much as you're getting out of me
I view working unpaid overtime as doing someone else out of a job
Hire someone else you cheap skate if works not getting done
That's as much as you're getting out of me
I view working unpaid overtime as doing someone else out of a job
Hire someone else you cheap skate if works not getting done
Spuck-uk
Banned
I've seen this happen in the west in game dev to be fair.
pretty done
Member
You honestly have to be a complete dumbass to work unpaid overtime. Didn't even know it was a thing until this thread.
Spuck-uk
Banned
I'm glad I live in a country with half decent labour laws. Trying to fire someone for not doing unpaid overtime is a nice way to attract a lawsuit.
Used to do stupid overtime in games development, very glad I saw the light on that and changed. I'll be here for 40 hours a week, and if you want more, you best have a good reason as to why, how you intend to compensate, and why it won't happen again.
Know your worth, and realise that 99% of the time your employer doesn't give a shit about you, and you should reciprocate.
Yeah I don't get that corporate culture. My wife has found herself in a spot where she's going to lose half her vacation this year. If she takes a day off, they call with emergencies all day. She takes calls all weekend for emergencies.. working long days for no OT pay. Now on top of that they've handed her the responsibility to assemble next year's budget, and when she said she needed to add an employee for help, they said no.. you just have to work more.
Fuck that.. time for a new job. She's been there 18 years and it wasn't like this, but now is owned by a private equity firm and they don't care, as they just want to flip the company. Their other new trick is to set revenue targets super unreasonable, lest people achieve bonus pay.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q6ndaxAdf80 😜
You are counting your work minutes with more care than most of your colleagues are auditing. Hope you are not really counting every minute you just happen to use your phone.
Depends on what you do for a living in Germany.
airmangataosenai
Member
Fun fact: the average American work week is actually longer than theirs. Let that sink in.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93364
xBladeM6x
Member
And this is why you won't catch me working with certain Unions. If you're not willing to work the worst hours / weekends / holidays / your whole family dies in a car crash and they want you to skip the funeral for work and 64358907893 hours of overtime every single month, you're branded as unreliable and will be cut first when lay offs happen. It's like a race to the bottom with some of these fucks.
Maintenance
Member
I knew someone who did 80-100h+ overtime per month for a long, long time.
You could see the life being drained from that person.
You could see the life being drained from that person.
dragonchild
Banned
Japan's economy was overhauled during the postwar occupation when Deming was brought over to teach them quality control, and to their credit, they glommed onto it with enthusiasm. A crash course on QC is beyond the scope (or attention span) of this thread, but roughly speaking, it's gathering data on what your workers are doing to gain understanding of their jobs (what a novel concept), either eliminating the bad or improving on the good, then repeating the cycle. Quality control & process improvement are what brought Japan out of postwar desolation into what eventually became the 2nd largest economy in the world. They owe their very survival to it, so especially in industrial sectors it's practically a religion. At my last job everyone was trained in QC, right down to the custodians.
The problem is that quality control is conceptually really hard; most Americans don't get it either, and the shortcuts are downright dangerous. What Japan has going now is an out-of-control perversion of QC that has abandoned all the core concepts in favor of minutae that Deming himself explicitly warned against. Gathering data without bothering to understand the process. Continual improvement seen as leaner operation, shorter turnaround times, pursuit of single-metric perfection. And to accomplish all this, the Japanese strive to master existing technologies to the bitter limit, well beyond when a technology or method has outlived its usefulness. I've heard stories of office workers using abacuses into the 1990s, and while I can't confirm that firsthand, based on what I've seen, I find it plausible.
Sometimes it works. When QC is implemented correctly, it's beautiful to behold. After all, the worst-to-second results of Deming's teachings are beyond dispute. But more often than not, these days it's a bunch of exhausted workers using 20-year-old technology because they've got so much institutional knowledge invested in it, filling out report after report for all kinds of senseless quality improvement activities dedicating hundreds of hours of labor to shaving a few more seconds off an optimized-to-hell process. There's no bushido at work here in the sense of self-sacrifice, but if you want an analogy, it's more like
The Last Samurai.
The Japanese somehow missed the memo that QC can and should be applied to itself.
I mean, if you leave early you will get dirty looks, but that's mainly because there's still a ton of work to be done and what you don't do, others will have to do. But the pressure isn't to kill themselves for honor -- FFS they're not that stupid -- but because the QC activities are mandatory, the existing processes are obsolete, and their competitors using more modern approaches are doing it faster & cheaper so they need to at least match that pace because their economy depends on exports. And if the company you work for can't, it goes under, and that's the fear. That you can make a 1000 widgets day for $0.50 apiece, then along comes a competitor making 2000 widgets a day for $0.25 apiece, so the only way the Japanese know how to compete is for everyone to work quadruple hours for free, or they're all out of work. But they also have to maintain their strict quality standards and internal management processes and it's all just too much work. And with every other company in the same situation, it's not like jumping to a competitor is any easier.
Japan has a ton of issues that I won't deny. They are sexist and racist, among other things. But what Americans don't understand is this principle of expending 2000 calories to hunt a 200-calorie squirrel because you've forgotten how to hunt, the guy who taught you is dead and can't correct your bad habits, and you're desperate to survive.
The problem is that quality control is conceptually really hard; most Americans don't get it either, and the shortcuts are downright dangerous. What Japan has going now is an out-of-control perversion of QC that has abandoned all the core concepts in favor of minutae that Deming himself explicitly warned against. Gathering data without bothering to understand the process. Continual improvement seen as leaner operation, shorter turnaround times, pursuit of single-metric perfection. And to accomplish all this, the Japanese strive to master existing technologies to the bitter limit, well beyond when a technology or method has outlived its usefulness. I've heard stories of office workers using abacuses into the 1990s, and while I can't confirm that firsthand, based on what I've seen, I find it plausible.
Sometimes it works. When QC is implemented correctly, it's beautiful to behold. After all, the worst-to-second results of Deming's teachings are beyond dispute. But more often than not, these days it's a bunch of exhausted workers using 20-year-old technology because they've got so much institutional knowledge invested in it, filling out report after report for all kinds of senseless quality improvement activities dedicating hundreds of hours of labor to shaving a few more seconds off an optimized-to-hell process. There's no bushido at work here in the sense of self-sacrifice, but if you want an analogy, it's more like
the samurai getting annihilated by machine guns in
Not the "beautiful death" part, but that you can spend six years practicing with a sword only to die by a bullet because you missed the fucking Industrial Revolution.
I mean, if you leave early you will get dirty looks, but that's mainly because there's still a ton of work to be done and what you don't do, others will have to do. But the pressure isn't to kill themselves for honor -- FFS they're not that stupid -- but because the QC activities are mandatory, the existing processes are obsolete, and their competitors using more modern approaches are doing it faster & cheaper so they need to at least match that pace because their economy depends on exports. And if the company you work for can't, it goes under, and that's the fear. That you can make a 1000 widgets day for $0.50 apiece, then along comes a competitor making 2000 widgets a day for $0.25 apiece, so the only way the Japanese know how to compete is for everyone to work quadruple hours for free, or they're all out of work. But they also have to maintain their strict quality standards and internal management processes and it's all just too much work. And with every other company in the same situation, it's not like jumping to a competitor is any easier.
Japan has a ton of issues that I won't deny. They are sexist and racist, among other things. But what Americans don't understand is this principle of expending 2000 calories to hunt a 200-calorie squirrel because you've forgotten how to hunt, the guy who taught you is dead and can't correct your bad habits, and you're desperate to survive.
PaulBizkit
Member
4 hours of overtime each month.
I work as a programmer/analyst in a software factory. And, since the boss has to close the office himself, we always leave up to 30 minutes after hour closing time.
I work as a programmer/analyst in a software factory. And, since the boss has to close the office himself, we always leave up to 30 minutes after hour closing time.
I was in a job with a very young workforce out of college. After I was there for 6 months (young company), they pretty much made no bones about it being a churn and burn shop. Onboard as fast as possible, and eject when they've used you up. This was in 2014 when college kids were hurting bad for jobs and willing to take anything. I was older, but out of work for 10 months, so I was hurting for a job too.
Funny enough, after I parted ways with them (after 10 months) I landed in the best job I've ever had. So, I'm not super bitter.
But that's the way alot of new companies are going. Make almost all your employees salaried, even ones who probably shouldn't be, then dump massive workloads requiring OT. You can recognize the companies with them advertising with terms like 'Work Hard, Play Hard' and that they have an onsite gym, ping pong table, and yoga classes. You know. All the amenities to make you stay at work longer than you should.
Remember kids, a job at its heart is a business transaction. You give your time and effort, and the company reimburses you with pay and benefits. If you give OT hours that are unpaid, they better be recognized in some other way, even intangibly. Otherwise, you're giving it away for free, and I bet you value your time more than that.
Last story on that job, towards the end there was an office move and the administrative assistant (not office manager) was being tasked with pretty much the entire move, including phone setup, furniture, everything for 200-250 people. After it was done, during a company meeting the CEO gave a bit of a recognition speech for her, and gave her a gift card, complimentary talking about how she had barely seen her child of 4 months or her other daughter in the past three months. And the fuckers applauded it, while I looked on it disgust. That shouldn't have been cheered, it should have been actionable.
PaulBizkit
Member
This post is gold. I didn't know about Deming until I read it.
It's amazing, how that person single-handedly changed Japan's way of work (they even consider him "the father of the third industrial revolution"). Now I can see more clearly how they became trapped in themselves. They survived the post-war crisis, but never stopped. They still do what they have always done and that's killing them.
The Japanese somehow missed the memo that QC can and should be applied to itself.
They need to know this. And the analogy of The Last Samurai is perfect for this situation. 20 years mastering the way of the sword, only to die from a bullet.
btw, they DO use abacuses and faxes.
The solution is not saying "just don't work that much", the solution might be "hey, let's not generate UNNECESSARY work, so we don't have to work more".
Man, that's fucking horrible. What a piece of shit...
Rktk
Member
Terrific post, thanks.
formasymphonic
Member
I believe that the requirement is 300 posts before you get bumped from junior to a full member, but after this and digging through your post history I'm gonna vote for you to get bumped-up early.
dragonchild
Banned
I agree 100%. Hit the nail on the head. I've screamed this thought in my mind. Unfortunately this is kind of like telling a pastor that they could get a lot more done in church if they dropped all the prayer. Technically true, but. . . well, you can imagine how well that'd go over.
The echoes of Deming's teachings are very much alive in Japanese work culture. Unfortunately Deming didn't stick around long enough for the transition from industry to service, so while Japan's industry held out much longer than America's, they eventually felt the pressure of the same challenges and don't know what to do. While QC can certainly be applied to white-collar work, it's a much more perilously abstract concept. See, with industry, it's pretty easy to figure out what needs to be done; QC is a tool to help you do it. Resources in, product out, the more resources you use to make less product, the less money you make. But white collar work is practically defined by management. I mean, sure, you need someone to answer the phones, but how do you define "success"? Number of calls answered? Time spent on the phone? Time per call? Customer satisfaction survey? Either there is no tangible output (which is a terrifying concept for managers worldwide), or the mission statement of the department defines the output (that's what those are really for, BTW). You need to be very careful here, which boils down to Deming's idea of complete understanding of a process. But -- and this applies to American managers as well (especially this whole bullshit MBA culture) -- most managers can't grasp the idea that they don't understand the very jobs their subordinates are performing. After all, they're the ones giving orders; how could they not understand? So the temptation is to skip the critically important "learn what the underlings are doing" part and instead make them gather mountains of useless data that don't actually improve quality or productivity. This alone is source material for a lot of "Dilbert" strips. But the Japanese take it to a whole 'nother level, because as you say, they never escaped the postwar mentality and how could they? It undeniably brought them prosperity well beyond the most wildly optimistic of IJA's imperial ambitions.
Most likely yes, but some work cultures value how it looks more than what it actually does in practice.
Second, lots of overtime can be used as a way to shirk shortcomings in planning and management. A manager telling his boss "I can make my employees work super hard to get stuff done!" sounds way better than "My employees are nice/desperate enough to work tons of overtime to make up for my inability to manage work properly!"
Yeah.. the look is what it's all about. The job I was in before this one, I was in Central time zone (corporate location), with all of my resources and customers in the Pacific time zone (the division I was responsible for). Basically nearly everyone I worked with was 2 hours behind me.
Naturally, I was on conference calls and such until 7PM regularly, since that was 5PM out West. When crunch time was happening, it was even worse. Early morning though, I had jack shit to do until 10AM when my folks came to work. After a couple of years I told the boss I'd be coming in at 9:30 so I'd have a half hour of quiet before the storm, rather than 2 hours of it. I was out the door less than a year later b/c I wasn't a company man. Boss told me I was making him look bad, despite the fact that he specifically hired me to get the West coast division in line.. which I did and then some. The folks out there tried to hire me directly but wasn't up for a move.
Goddamn, son! That's VERY helpful.
You just needed to type a bit more and you've got a dissertation.
Or add a 'fuck' and 'shit' for a passionate college essary.
dlavu said:
Shit, there's recent research disproving multi-tasking as being effective for workers. Recent reading I did was that when switching between tasks, it takes you roughly 15 minutes to get back to working at the level you were operating at before you left it.
Dragonchild said:
Hmmm, double it and tell us how you feel. It will be an experiment of sorts.
I'm glad I realized all this was fucking bullshit and got the fuck out of the Big 4 as soon as I possibly could. People thought I was nuts for leaving so soon. But I still have my sanity.
matt360
Member
This is really great stuff. As an 11 year resident of Japan, it's actually kind of cathartic to read.
In my experience working in Japan for about a third of my life, I have to say that a certain amount of victim blaming is warranted (by victim I mean workers in general, not the person in the news story). Yes there are places where you will face real consequences for not working overtime, but there are many more places where exactly nothing will happen if you go home on time, yet workers are too chicken shit to do so. People are so quick to fall in line, and in many cases, put pressure on themselves to appear busy and work late because they assume it's what's expected of them, when in many cases it's not.
Steps are being taken to improve things in many places. Some of the ideas, like Premium Friday, are actually causing people to work MORE because they have to make up for the work they miss on Fridays by working later other days. But at many public schools, there's now one mandatory day a week with no club activity and teachers are required to go home by 5:00 or 5:30. Kinks need to be worked out, but it's a good start. The government calling out black companies by name certainly won't hurt. It's not enough, but small steps are being taken in wake of the Dentsu incident. The bosses need to be held accountable in these instances, but the workers also need to stand up for themselves, and I don't see that happening at my workplace.
Also, I've seen a few people say that Americans work longer hours than Japanese. In a sense that is true, but that is because 40% of Japan's workforce are contracted workers with irregular hours, which is another major issue entirely. However, if you take your average American businessman and your typical Japanese businessman, there's no way in hell the American works longer hours.
Ten_Fold
Member
I work a pretty shitty job,an they usually get upset if I dont work more than 5 days in a row, at first I was naive thinking they would love if I take every OT day offered which I worked 23 days in a row before taking a day off an almost got in trouble for doing so, now Im waiting on my background check to clear for me new office job so I can quit this dump, my arms are hurting.
Septimus Prime
Member
It's actually a core tenet of Agile (or at least Scrum). The productivity loss for multitasking goes up by some 20% per additional task.
I've spent pretty much my entire career working on the American side of Japanese companies, and I see all the time a lot of what dragonchild has been posting. There's a lot of work for the sake of work and processes in place that benefit no one, where no one even knows why they're there. Often, I'll receive emails and messages from my Japanese colleagues when I know they shouldn't be at work, and rarely is what they want actually urgent.
I just looked this up this "Premium Friday."
Articles for those who want to know more. Apparently it's not doing so well:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2...left-early-first-premium-friday/#.WdgwLFtSzIV
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2...y-campaign-danger-running-steam/#.Wdgw61tSzIU
Euphoria14
Member
Same here. People would also comment because Im a 7-3:30 guy, barely if ever stay late (late being maybe 4-4:30). My boss knew quickly that I dont work OT.
Despite the jokes and comments I still ended up being the one who got promoted.
baxter2231
Member
Feels like the US is getting more and more like Japan when it comes to work.
shaowebb
Member
Im at 371.5 hours of overtime for the year so far. 280 of those happened in the span of around 10 weeks.
There are reasons I dont get to finish things I desperately wish to these days. For the record though I at least get long breaks and dont have to work till I drop. Its a fairly paced if long work load I have. In japan, I cannot say I believe this person had the same. Im at work a lot but I'm not nonstop till I drop. I just dont get to leave that often. This reporter sounds like it was nonstop the whole way down the line.
There are reasons I dont get to finish things I desperately wish to these days. For the record though I at least get long breaks and dont have to work till I drop. Its a fairly paced if long work load I have. In japan, I cannot say I believe this person had the same. Im at work a lot but I'm not nonstop till I drop. I just dont get to leave that often. This reporter sounds like it was nonstop the whole way down the line.
MikeHattsu
Member
Looks like there was a ruling in the Dentsu incident:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2...orking-hours-led-suicide-24-year-old-recruit/
4400 USD, eh...
andythinkpad
Member
It probably is but I get paid 1.5x for my overtime so I manage to find a lot of stuff to do at work.
FF Seraphim
Member
The hell? Only ¥500,000? That is nothing to most corporations...
SaviourMK2
Member
Jesus Christ Japan, you're killing yourself faster than global warming.
Necron
Member
We work too much in Switzerland as well. By law there's a maximum 45 hours per week. Some exceptions apply to a maximum of 50 hours. The national average is very close to it with approximately 42 hours (based on the Federal Statistics). I saw horrible cases of burnout and over hours in the pharmaceutical business.
We even voted against reducing the work week back in 2002. This strong sense of working ethics and pride thereof is actually causing a multitude of health problems.
We even voted against reducing the work week back in 2002. This strong sense of working ethics and pride thereof is actually causing a multitude of health problems.
Saucestin_Roast
Member
Jesus there is more to life than work. That goes for Americans too. We aren't as bad as Japan seems to be but even we could improve.
Man what a horrible story. When I was working as a mover there were a handful of weeks where I effectively worked 70+ hours between the two companies I worked for and cash jobs for drivers, so I almost never got any overtime pay. Totally unsustainable and unhealthy, although luckily that was only for brief periods. It also wasn't really good for the moving companies either, as it was during one of these periods that I dropped a desk and broke my big toe, treatment of which was paid through worker's comp, and had a couple damage claims filed. Those might not have happened if I hadn't been overworked beyond my already meager abilities. Things won't change until governments crack down and actually enforce existing labor laws though, but pitiful penalties like $4,400 won't do it.
Wolf Akela
Member
~160 hours of overtime, which equates to 8 hours of overtime per day. I've done exactly this, but only for an entire week. I already felt like I'm slowly killing my own body towards the end. The work involved with financial data for a company, so I couldn't afford to make mistakes.
Coffee barely kept me up. My speech was starting to get slurry/stuttery, like I'd involuntarily repeat a word I just said and that's not to buy time to think of what to say next. The stress of the work itself compounded the issue I was having. I couldn't see an end in sight and I kept bumping into problems with the work I was doing. Because it was financial data, it was also time-sensitive: new data comes along. which can screw up what I've already done. I couldn't even take a quick nap. While I could whip up something so that the data gets processed, the problem was that the volume of data is so huge that the processing tools we had would die at unknown times, which meant having to make adjustments. Of course, if the processing produced incorrect data (happens), have to adjust it too. So basically, not only was I racing against the clock, I had to keep watching it as it went.
It took a co-worker describing my shit looks and an old manager overhearing it to send me home and get rested. I don't ever want to go through that ordeal again. I can't imagine 4x that amount. I would have quit halfway through and I wouldn't even care if I burned bridges. I'm not killing myself for any company.
Coffee barely kept me up. My speech was starting to get slurry/stuttery, like I'd involuntarily repeat a word I just said and that's not to buy time to think of what to say next. The stress of the work itself compounded the issue I was having. I couldn't see an end in sight and I kept bumping into problems with the work I was doing. Because it was financial data, it was also time-sensitive: new data comes along. which can screw up what I've already done. I couldn't even take a quick nap. While I could whip up something so that the data gets processed, the problem was that the volume of data is so huge that the processing tools we had would die at unknown times, which meant having to make adjustments. Of course, if the processing produced incorrect data (happens), have to adjust it too. So basically, not only was I racing against the clock, I had to keep watching it as it went.
It took a co-worker describing my shit looks and an old manager overhearing it to send me home and get rested. I don't ever want to go through that ordeal again. I can't imagine 4x that amount. I would have quit halfway through and I wouldn't even care if I burned bridges. I'm not killing myself for any company.
30yearsofhurt
Member
Over September I racked up 96 hours time in lieu and did another 30 hours paid overtime.
It was mostly due to one bad manager who has been promoted well past her abilities just fucking things up with gross incompetence.
Middle management stepped in and fired her and gave me her job until a replacement comes in next month.
This is my first weekend off since Sept 3rd and I'm sitting at home browsing GAF.
It was mostly due to one bad manager who has been promoted well past her abilities just fucking things up with gross incompetence.
Middle management stepped in and fired her and gave me her job until a replacement comes in next month.
This is my first weekend off since Sept 3rd and I'm sitting at home browsing GAF.
Fuck, its nothing to not a minor number of people. Its not even tip money to corporations.
oneils
Member
Poor woman. She must have been pretty ambitious or career oriented. I worked long hours in my 20s to pay for school and get out of debt. Once that was done, i took the easiest work I could find. Cant imagine working anything close to 80 hour weeks for anything less than $420k. Id need four times the pay to do twice the work. Its how it scales in my mind.
I believe this. Its crazy, I just got back from a business trip at 9:30 pm last night, been up working since 6am. I am not a sales guy so my job is not travel based. Of course when I travel my "home job" does not go on pause.
Example, my boss sent an email to myself and my colleague (who was on vacation with his wife who just got over cancer treatment) while I was travelling for customer visits that he needed help in pulling together a presentation for his management tomorrow. "Please fill in slides x,y,z for me". I got chuckle when his email started with "I know you are traveling and colleague is on vacation, but...." This was my buddy's product line, but I knew this vaca was important to him and his wife. I took it on, worked till midnight, got 6 hours sleep and then got up to get ready for my customer meeting at 8am.
Other things that my company has done to help with work-life balance:
Implemented swing hours (take every other Friday off by working 9 hour days). The ONLY people this is available to is Salary, so you do the math.
Removed vacation tracking for Mid-Upper level employees. The pitch: You guys are big boys, we are not going to limit you to an x amount of hours of vacation per year. Take what you need, you know what you need to get done, just tie off with your manager. Reality: Since there is not a number with use-it-or-loose-it attached, we have no leverage over management when trying to ask for vaca. And even if we get vaca approved, see example above.
Last Vacaiton I was getting up at 5am before my family so I could get a few hours in to try to catch-up on emails or steer any emergencies before they became crisis-mode and had to miss out on a family vaca day.
And to all the comments about its just "Capitalist America", I work for a French Company HQ'd in Paris.
I once worked as contract worker for HP. My first month working there was hell. I was involved in a data center project, and most of the implementation were done out of office hour (so that it didn't affect production).
Everyday I worked till ~3AM and I need to get back to work around 9-10AM. So that means for a month, I only slept for 4-5 hours per day. I also needed to work on weekends, Saturday and Sunday.
The following months were better, but I still needed to work every weekends (but thank goodness Sunday was off). This happened for one year. I had to work on Saturday almost every weekend.
The company gave you bonus for overtime, but in the end I didn't extend my contract. No money can compensate the mental exhaustion that I experienced.
I live in a shitty 3rd world country, so I really don't have a choice. But I don't understand why people from first world country allow themselves to be exploited like that. Not only Japan, I heard many American companies (yes including HP, fuck HP) have obsession with overtime. They wear it like a badge of honor (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/opinion/sunday/silicon-valley-work-life-balance-.html).
Everyday I worked till ~3AM and I need to get back to work around 9-10AM. So that means for a month, I only slept for 4-5 hours per day. I also needed to work on weekends, Saturday and Sunday.
The following months were better, but I still needed to work every weekends (but thank goodness Sunday was off). This happened for one year. I had to work on Saturday almost every weekend.
The company gave you bonus for overtime, but in the end I didn't extend my contract. No money can compensate the mental exhaustion that I experienced.
I live in a shitty 3rd world country, so I really don't have a choice. But I don't understand why people from first world country allow themselves to be exploited like that. Not only Japan, I heard many American companies (yes including HP, fuck HP) have obsession with overtime. They wear it like a badge of honor (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/opinion/sunday/silicon-valley-work-life-balance-.html).