I reckon it's more that initiative is not expected, or even discouraged. You will work on what the direct superior tells you, end of story. And the more people the boss can lord on, the bigger his empire looks like; so there is little incentive for middle-managers to pursue efficiency.
Let alone the fact that in IT, you can rarely produce something worthwhile after 4-6 hours.
It would also be hard to respect arbitrarily chosen rules, that have no proven effect on productivity.
It's hard to see Japan being competitive with archaic rules like the above.
The rep from a textbook company would go to the teacher's lounge every semester, bow to each of the teacher's one at a time in front of their desks, and ask them what they wanted to order from the catalog. The teacher's could've easily put in an order online or over the phone and I imagine the salesman had to go to each school in person.
Of course, with statistics like these one has to consider the fact that second-income earners working part-time jobs make the statistic skew low, which means that in countries where wages are high enough to feed a family with only one parent working, the numbers will skew higher despite less actual hours worked. I am note sure to what degree the statistics address this issue.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
Employee is now a loaded word. Does this statistic include contractors or just hired "employees"? A great many workers in the US, from delivery drivers to doctors, are no longer actual employees. Do their hours count?
Overtime, until very recently, went uncounted and was unpaid. So the statistics you quote are almost certainly very wrong.
Recently the government has been cracking down on overtime (and especially on unpaid overtime), and requires companies to track overtime. It's only considered excessive overtime if it's more than 45 hours extra hours a month, to give you an understanding of just how much people are working.
If you compared two families using this same system:
* Family A - 1 worker, 40 hours per week, 1 non-worker
* Family B - 2 workers, 20 hours per week each
You'd get an average of 40 vs 20, which makes it appear as though Family A works "more" than Family B.
As walking around with a clipboard looks a lot more busy than typing.
Japan is placed somewhere in the upper middle among OECD countries when it comes to average working hours per year and the percentage of workers working more than 60 hours per week.
I wonder if those statistics are wrong, or perhaps misleading.
By all means, the statistics could very well be wrong or misleading, but the number of stories you've heard isn't really evidence.
If we tried to extrapolate that hypothesis, shouldn't it imply that countries with considerably lower averages (e.g.: Germany, France, Sweden) ought to be considerably further ahead in automation than they currently are?