Hi! I wrote this long post. I’m basing off of it a lot so it maybe worth reading it before reading this, but I will summarize a bit here and be more direct. I am going to rectify parts of the premise this is based off of.

Postwar Japan is well known for its extreme work environment, with 80+ hour work weeks

Before 1987, the standard work hours in Japan was 48 hours per week. This was part of the 1947 Constitution, but voluntarily reformed by the Japanese. Currently the standard work hours per week is 40 and this was implemented in 1994. So I think “well known” just meant different. I think there was a lot of sensationalization especially during the “high speed growth era” of the 1960s/1970s. Japan was not like the US or Europe, but was quite developed. There was suspicion of Japan because Japan had a different model of capitalism and even the system of government and democracy was peculiarly different, which appeared successful at the time challenging assumptions about Western institutions who were not seeing economic success at the time. Yet this was just different, but not necessarily untrue that the Japanese worked a lot. So the historical context is necessary and it remains a valid question especially as Japan has seen problems.

Regarding with 80+ hour work weeks. This was likely outlier cases of karoshi (death resulting from overwork). First, there is a lot of data on this topic, but it is still rather unclear. Overtime and even work hours is actually not consistently accounted and so it gets into the weeds of statistics. That said, the different data and analyses might not give the whole picture. Kuroda (2009) using a labor survey estimates “extra work hours per week” at 10 for men and 7 for women. Depending on the time period, it fluctuates to overall work hours, but she concludes a stability in “extra hours” from 1986 - 2006. According to her analysis, the total mean (all workers in the sample) was around 50 - 55 hours per week(despite changes). The standard deviation roughly 2 - 3. In 1976 the mean was 48 with similar standard deviation. That is actually par to standard work hours. Subsequently then there was increase. So this safely assumes that anything above 65 was rare with 80+ exceedingly rare. Yet this is one study. There might be an “exception for the rule” bias and probably resulting from sensationalization of karoshi cases, which are rare. (It was first introduced by medical academia in 1982 and became defined legally circa 1987). So the point is to moderate the truth a bit.

In addition, this is likely only a small segment of the workforce of “salaryman”. Salarymen were at most 33 percent, but currently much lower. The majority of the workforce in Japan is/was wage labor, which was laissez faire. Salarymen were more susceptible to karoshi, but expect still only a fraction of these. Thus, it would not be fair assume that working hours were commonly that extreme, but this topic of ‘burden’ on the Japanese labor overall remains a problem in contemporary Japan.

… unpaid overtime being a common occurrence

This is complicated because Japanese companies compensated with frequent bonuses and other pay structures. See the above post on the employment institutions. So overtime was compensated in other areas, but many companies did not pay “overtime” as might be accounted elsewhere. There is again dual structures of Japanese labor between regular and non-regular workers. So mind that this referring again to a small segment. So there are companies that engage in bad behavior often labelled as “black” companies, but this was not again the rule.

What gave rise to this work culture?

The law. Basically it was hard to dismiss employees (regular workers). Then it was also allowable to mandate overtime. See the full explanation in the above post.

and why were Japanese labor unions ineffective at securing labor reforms?

First, as said above, the law created a legal precedent about overtime and dismissal. The unions could not change that unless it was legislated. The pro-business LDP was in power all but a few years. The fragmented left leaning opposition parties that horizontal trade unions supported never really got in power.

Second, unions aren’t monolithic. There were “enterprise unions”, which are intracompany unions. That was a capitalist innovation to keep disputes in the company, but it gave management the advantage. Enterprise union covered mostly salarymen and certain industries like manufacturing. Thus they limited union influence. Then there are horizontal trade unions, which did/do like unions elsewhere, but they limited to several industries. They actually did not unify well and went through changes losing influence. Also again, most of the workforce isn’t/wasn’t unionized especially “non-regular” workers. So there was fragmentation and so it was actually harder to develop influence. So overtime was a bargaining chip of labor so they could demand bonuses and wage increases. As long as output and profitability was high, the unions demanded compensation. So it became a feature of the ‘game’ and there was a sense of ‘utilitarian collectivism’. In other words, not everyone was working extreme work hours, but only a minority while others free-ride. The karoshi lawsuits show this where there was bullying and other social pressure behavior which led to neglectful behavior. So unions were sidelined or even exacerbating long work hours.

So overall Japan is just different. The last part of post is explaining a different set of institutions that arose in Japan. This led to economic development at the expense of democracy and individual rights. The labor institutions are actually quite laisser-faire: under-regulated and rather little social safety nets. So the void was filled by social institutions (which may have pre-existed). I argue that these are influenced by state ideology and a rather cozy relationship with the ‘economic bureaucracy’. The economic stagnation since the 1990s is related to those fundamental differences in institutions. So undoing them is the “modernity” versus “tradition” conundrum I try to lay out.

To iterate again from my post, there are measures in place and there is/has been civil society work to mitigate extreme work environments. Japanese companies have made strides to mitigate things like karoshi or its relative karojisatsu (suicide from overwork). Japanese companies are more liable for worker welfare, and there are changing social attitudes about work. Yet there is limitations since these changes so far are limited to big companies, and thus not covering the entire workforce. The economic stagnation complicates things and thus this is an on-going topic in Japan. So it has accumulated that economics struck back and is connected to many issues such as the demographic problem, education/skill development, labor productivity, economic inequality, and global economic competition.

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Sources: see above.