Just to agree with you on the bentou boxes. I worked in a high school for 5 years and often ate lunch with the students. Never once did I see an overly cute benou box :-) My wife makes my bentou box, but at that time I made hers. It takes about 20 minutes to make in the morning, but you have to be organised. Japanese people also tend to have a large, cooked morning meal (which my wife now makes, but when I was working at the school I made for her). For me, I'd often be cooking for about an hour every morning (including both breakfast and lunch), which meant getting up at about 6. Japanese people bathe at night, which frees up a bit of time.

I don't want to understate the difficulty that women have in the workplace in Japan. The breakfast and lunch are manageable, but then you have to do laundry (and if you have school kids, it's a big job in Japan). People hang their laundry outside, so it's a problem if you aren't there to get it if it rains. You have to be back in time to cook dinner for your kids, but you have responsibilities to stay late at work most days, etc, etc. Some of my female colleagues barely slept and it just wasn't healthy.

Distributing the workload is not so hard, but it needs a cultural shift. It's slowly happening though. You may note that my wife cooks for me now and wonder why... I liked doing breakfast and lunch, but I think my wife prefers doing it herself (my bentous aren't very good, I'll admit). I suspect (but don't know) that she also feels better, as a woman, if she does that job. That's a strange idea in western culture, but perhaps it will sound more understandable if I say that I feel better, as a man, if I make a salary. Stupid and arbitrary, but culture is like that sometimes. It's hard to change and you need to go slowly.