On the whole, this is a rather more "equal" process. The top managers don't get paid the huge amounts they do in the US. However this also leads to all the unproductive situations you can imagine, with seniors running the company into the ground and the juniors not being able to do anything about it.
It always fascinates me how Japan is full of anachronistic, counter-productive traditions and is also one of the most advanced countries in the world at the same time.
The whole place is full of contradictions. If everyone works absolutely insane hours and has no life, one would imagine the life expectancy would be shot as well, just due to the stress.
Japan was one of the most advanced countries in the world.
The country has been stagnating for quite a while. South Korea and Taiwan have since eclipsed it by PPP-adjusted metrics per person. (Japanese make higher paper incomes than South Koreans and Taiwanese, but they also generally pay more for imports due to tariffs.)
My off the cuff theory is perhaps their diet is very good, so offsets some of the shortened life expectancy from stress? On the graph of stress vs diet, where being in the top right is the worst for life expectancy, being high on only one might help.
Having said that, I don't know if the average Japanese diet is good. Just postulating a possibility.
On the whole it is probably better than US, but it's not like they don't have unhealthy habits either. Smoking is far more common than in most Western countries. Drinking I'm not so sure, but they do have the custom of forced work drinking parties, and most Asians have the gene that produce extra toxins from alcohol, so the harm from drinking must not be negligible.
I would posit that the life expectancy is in part due to lack of documentation of dying. There are many cases in Tokyo where old people living alone are found dead only weeks later when neighbors complained about the smell.
