Workplace standards. Men work too much and earn too little to support a family and be a present father. Having a child destroys women’s careers and they are stuck at home with a child and an absent husband. These are issues in many countries, but in Japan in particular, employees work much longer hours, and company loyalty is culturally enforced making it hard to find a new/better job.
Different countries use different methods so you can’t use this as a comparison.
“ The data are intended for comparisons of trends over time; they are unsuitable for comparisons of the level of average annual hours of work for a given year, because of differences in their sources and method of calculation.”
Nevertheless according to that same data the avg has been decreasing. In the 70s the Japanese worked 2200 hours per year and now it's closer to 1600 hours.
Since the 80s, labor unions in Japan have been pushing for less hours worked and more holiday days. Currently the Japanese have between 10-20 PTO days per year.
My point is that this idea the Japanese are overworking themselves to death is mostly a myth from previous decades.
The data from the previous link shows that Japan has increased from 11% part time workers in 1970 to 25% part time workers in 2022. It's entirely possible that full-time workers are overworked while part-time workers are under-employed, leading to a decrease in average hours worked. Full-time workers can be time poor, while part-time workers may be money poor.
