You should feel more sorry for your Japanese associates, who spend 12-14 hours at the office every day and never see their families, even though they probably could've gotten their work done in half that time.
I don't know about that .. they spent more time doing things that mattered to them - like, work, or associating with work colleagues/blowing off steam - and less time doing things that were highly destructive to their health on an immediate basis, like .. sitting in traffic for hours, being very un-social, breathing in smog.
EDIT: Is it a 'cultural downvote', or something else I said? Because my Japanese friends still don't 'get' why Americans think its so vital to have so much private time being spent 'on the road'. This is very definitely a cultural artifact, people ..
Also, there's often unspoken rules, for example, someone leaving earlier than their boss being rude.
When they were in growth (back prior to 1980) where lifetime employment and salary increase by age were common, there was at least some incentive to put up with that, but they are now gone as the thing in the past, they are just getting the short end of the stick, as losing your current job might mean that there aren't any other jobs. (Getting hired in Japan outside of new hire -- that's something other than right after graduating, can be very tough.)
Now, having said that, of course, there are people out there who have more liberty in deciding how much they should work each day, and doing it as their choice, but considering this being nationwide issue, I wouldn't think that's a majority.
Note: If you are someone from outside of Japan, you will get some perk as a foreigner, that you are not expected to go along with the above. Merely appearing like the Japanese would lock me into same expectation as Japanese. (Which I envy "foreigners" every time I visit Japan, as my mindset is as foreign from Japanese.) Japanese people usually don't really discriminate foreigners, but they do have different social expectations. (Just you never can be "one of them.")
I just don't think the city planners of America in the 20th Century were as sensitive to these issues as they should have been. We cannot deny that the automobile-economy made America very unhealthy, and it wasn't until the era of the gym that this became lesser of a health issue. Even still today, though, by direct personal (thus: anecdotal) evidence, I can say without a doubt that my American friends are far, far less healthy than the Japanese side. Alas, its just a fact - even if we factor in the binge-work and alcoholism. Not a popular perspective, but I think Americans need to get some humility about this factor and stop building such monstrous cities with such dependencies.. okay, this is now outside the scope of the original article, which was fundamentally about the differences between cultures and how it affects technical deployment decisions, but - after all - this is fundamentally an Architectural problem as much as it is a cultural one (and the two cannot be dissociated, really..) In the end, could the Twitter difference really boil down to just how well the space of the two countries is utilized? I think it does, ultimately, play a role in this discussion.
Having lived that life style, it doesn't leave you with much free time. Dinner with kids and spouse? Exercise? Cooking? Errands? Creative hobbies? 7-8 hours sleep / night?
My commute last for 30 minutes on a bicycle, I would like everyone to have the option to leave at a reasonable hour to live their life. If they want to continue working, that's cool too. But the impression I get from the Japanese culture is that it isn't so free to do so. It is 'expected'. I heard that Japanese employees don't leave until their boss leaves, which could be an ungodly hour. Having lived the extreme, my personal opinion is that balance is best.
Have you bothered to actually look at the statistics? Americans have some of the shortest commute times in the OECD, while the Japanese have some of the longest: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commut...
> being very un-social
This is entirely subjective, but I've found that Americans are much more sociable, particularly with strangers, than the Japanese (or most Europeans) are.
> breathing in smog
Again, have you looked at the statistics? According to recent OECD data, America is less polluted than Japan: http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/environment/