One of the things we have to understand about Japanese society is its gender structure, a structure similar to what the United States had in the 1950s. Women do all the domestic labor. Men are in the factories and shops and they’re working long hours, but they don’t do much work when they come home. They don’t take care of children, they don’t do housework, cooking, etc. In the U.S. there are both men and women in the work force and both men and women at home. Japanese workers may work longer in the marketplace, but you have to calculate the total amount of work that people do to figure out how hard people are working and how much leisure time they have.