When they were young they might spend the night at the office, sleeping under their desks. For years they would go out drinking with colleagues and clients, returning home sozzled at 3am before rising at dawn to head back to the office. They accepted boring jobs or postings to provincial backwaters without question. And they did it all simply because the company asked them to. The thought of finding another employer never crossed their minds. That is how the "salaryman" became the paragon of modern Japan, the white-collar hero who fashioned the world's second-largest economy from the ashes of war. But he is becoming a figure of the past. This has enormous implications in a country in which the company is the dominant institution in people's lives, affecting not only Japan's world of work but also wider Japanese society.
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