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Originally Posted by Katsunami
I would do such things only if it was MY OWN company. Working hard is one thing. Working 50-75% overtime for 'the company' without pay is nuts. IMHO, of course.
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Not in your 'opinion,' but in your 'culture.' That's what shapes our opinion. If we look at other cultures and try to evaluate them based on our own cultural norms, they ALL look nuts! Everything from eating, dressing, working, and family life. In America we look at men who wear skirts as crazy, but in Scotland, a kilt doesn't get a second glance. It's all normal when kept within its own cultural boundaries.
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......Those are, to me, sentences expressing that these 25-35 year old women are not happy being at home all the time, and having a husband they rarely see. It seems they do want to marry/have a relationship but still want to work on their own and have a bit of their own life, and are even willing to leave their country for it.
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Absolutely right. There are plenty of them. They just are not the norm. Even if you see a few hundred people in your advertisements, or a few thousand, there are almost 130,000,000 in Japan. Every society has people who are discontented with their own culture. Hell, every expat living abroad fits that picture, including me! It doesn't mean that most Americans want to live abroad.
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My very unprofessional conclusion: it seems Japan needs a cultural shift in the working place, or they will end up with overworked (or dead) men and no women.
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In fact, Japan is going through a radical and rapid change in its cultural norms right now. Perhaps too rapid to survive in a positive outcome. A rising crime rate, a declining birth rate, a radical change in the distribution chain in merchandising, an increase in kiretsu holdings, etc., etc., etc. What doesn't seem to be changing though are the attitudes about employment, family, and religion.
Japan is, and has always been, a culture based on Confucian values rather than Christian ones. And THAT is a very big difference. 'Family' comes first in Christian values, but only fourth in Confucian values. This is why Japanese men are more devoted to their employer than their families, and are willing to work themselves to death to see that it prospers. We in the West have no such allegiance except to our families, or in some cases, to our military organizations.
It's a very different culture. We simply can not view it, not understand it, and not really appreciate it if we continue to evaluate it based on a different criteria. It's a case of apples vs oranges.
Besides... who are we to judge?
Stitchawl