The salaryman culture isn't dead in Japan; and that culture came as a bargain - loyalty was a two-way street, as the saying goes. So he would consider working without contractual guarantees because those corporations still have a track record of delivering without contractual guarantees.

Whereas American corporations haven't had that spirit for a long time (replacing it with a letter-of-the-law attitude) and a number apparently actively seek to exploit their employees' delusions that some might still have that spirit, as this MySpace example perhaps illustrates.