[karthie_a]

From my knowledge about Japan working environment, the culture is not to leave work before your superior. i.e - the people who works in C level can not leave until the CEO leaves workplace. This follows and trickle down till lowest i believe, not sure if this is true till date. Someone can verify.

[blublblu]

At this point it's a misconception. In the past it was true that people rarely left before their managers, but this has mostly changed. Most managers aren't strict about or care about it anymore. Working conditions drastically improved in the last 10-20 years. The horror stories of japanese work enviorments come from the time of the economic boom a few decades ago (Like OP said when he was working) and have been left behind. There still are companies, reffered to as "black" companies, that have very abusive work enviorments, but they are now rare. Even just in the last 5 years it has improved a lot. It's still not perfect and a lot of things can still be changed to help make workers life better and easier, but at least it's improving.