Japan is often described through the things it does remarkably well: trains that run with extraordinary precision, streets that feel safe, public spaces that remain orderly and a culture in which consideration for other people is woven into everyday life. Much of this works not because somebody is constantly enforcing written rules, but because people understand what is expected of them.
Having lived and worked in Tokyo for nearly a decade, I came to realise just how powerful those expectations can be. You learn quickly that there is often a correct way to behave without anybody needing to tell you what it is. When to speak, when not to speak, how much inconvenience you should cause other people, how you behave towards someone more senior and what being a good employee is supposed to look like can all be influenced by rules that may never appear in an employment contract or instruction manual.
That ability to coordinate behaviour is one of Japan’s strengths. It would be easy—and wrong—to write an article suggesting that Japanese society would somehow improve if people simply stopped conforming and became more individualistic.
But there is another side to unwritten rules.
The longer a rule survives, the easier it becomes to forget why it existed in the first place. What begins as a useful way of creating stability, cooperation or trust can eventually become an expectation people follow because that’s simply how things are done.
And Japan is now confronting an interesting question.
What happens when the world changes faster than the unwritten rules that helped organise it?
For much of Japan’s post-war economic rise, the relationship between employee and company was built around an unusually powerful bargain. Large employers offered stability, training and the prospect of a long career, while employees were expected to return that security with loyalty and commitment.
The arrangement was never universal, but it became influential enough to shape expectations far beyond the companies that practised it most strongly. Remaining with one employer could demonstrate reliability, while repeatedly changing jobs could carry very different connotations from those it might have in a more mobile labour market.
There was logic behind that system. If a company expected to employ someone for decades, investing heavily in their development made sense, while employees had good reason to become deeply committed to an organisation that might provide security throughout their working life.
The problem comes when one side of an old bargain begins changing faster than the other.
Japan’s labour market is no longer frozen in the model that defined its post-war decades. Companies face labour shortages, careers are becoming more varied, and even Japan’s traditional reliance on developing employees largely within individual companies is being reconsidered. Research published by the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training in 2026 describes growing limits to that company-centred training model as labour mobility and the nature of work change.
That doesn’t mean younger Japanese workers have suddenly rejected loyalty. In fact, a 2025 JILPT survey found that across every age group more respondents still preferred the idea of remaining with their current employer for a long period than building a career through job changes. What is interesting, however, is that people in their twenties and thirties were more likely than older groups to favour developing their careers by changing jobs, while younger workers also placed greater emphasis on wages and, among those in their thirties, the efficient use of their time.
That is a much more interesting story than simply saying young Japanese people are rebelling.
The unwritten rule itself is being renegotiated.
Loyalty may still have value, but increasingly it has to compete with another question:
Japan’s relationship with work cannot be reduced to just long hours, but few subjects demonstrate the power of an unwritten rule more clearly.
In a workplace where commitment is highly valued, being present can become a visible signal of that commitment. Leaving, while colleagues or a manager remain at their desks, can feel different than simply completing the work you were employed to do, because the decision is being interpreted socially as well as practically.
During my years working in Tokyo, this was one of the cultural differences that was difficult not to notice. The important point was not that every Japanese employee worked extraordinary hours or that every company expected them to. It was that the meaning attached to leaving work could sometimes extend beyond whether your work was actually finished or not.
When effort becomes measured partly through visibility, staying can demonstrate commitment, even though staying longer may not necessarily produce better work. An employee who completes a task efficiently and then leaves can appear less dedicated than someone who remains at their desk for considerably longer.
Japan itself has recognized the costs associated with excessive working hours. Work-style reforms introduced statutory overtime limits, generally setting overtime at 45 hours a month and 360 hours a year, with higher limits permitted only under specified exceptional circumstances. The government also continues to operate measures aimed specifically at preventing karoshi – death associated with overwork.
The existence of regulation, however, highlights an important NoRuleBook distinction.
Written rules can limit how many hours somebody works. They cannot, by themselves, remove an unwritten belief about what a committed employee looks like.
Changing that requires something slower: Changing what people reward, admire, and expect from one another.
Japan’s preference for security did not develop without reason. For generations, securing a position with an established company could provide predictable income, social standing and a career that might last for most of a person’s working life. In that environment, choosing an established organization (eg, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Sony), over an uncertain start-up, or a conventional career over entrepreneurship, was not simply cultural conservatism; it could be an entirely rational response to the opportunities available.
The difficulty comes when a preference that once made sense becomes an assumption that security should always take priority over opportunity, even as the economic environment around it changes.
Starting a business is risky, and joining a young company can still offer far less certainty than working for an established corporation. But avoiding those risks carries risks of its own, particularly for an economy that needs new companies, new technologies and new ways of competing. Japan’s government has increasingly recognised this problem and, rather interestingly, is now attempting to encourage some of the behaviour that its traditional employment culture did relatively little to reward.
Japan’s Startup Development Five-Year Plan, adopted in 2022, set an ambitious goal of increasing annual investment in start-ups more than tenfold to ¥10 trillion by fiscal 2027. But the plan is about more than investment. It includes entrepreneurship education, stronger networks between founders and investors, expanded funding and measures intended to make it easier for new businesses to emerge and grow.
There is something distinctly NoRuleBook about that change. A society that built extraordinary economic success around large, established organisations is now deliberately trying to create an environment in which more people are prepared to leave established paths and build something uncertain instead. The old rule has not suddenly become wrong; a secure career can still be an excellent choice. What has changed is the assumption that choosing uncertainty is necessarily the less sensible option.
That distinction matters because security and risk are rarely opposites in the simple way we imagine them to be. Remaining with a large company may reduce some risks while increasing others, particularly if an industry is being disrupted or the skills developed inside one organisation become less valuable elsewhere. Starting a business exposes someone to obvious financial and career risks, but it can also create skills, relationships and opportunities that would never have emerged from remaining on the conventional path.
The question, then, is not whether Japanese workers should become less cautious, or whether entrepreneurship is somehow superior to employment. It is whether an old definition of security still deserves to determine which choices are regarded as sensible.
Security can protect you from uncertainty. But avoiding uncertainty can also protect you from opportunity.
One of the things I came to appreciate while living in Japan was the extraordinary amount of consideration people often show towards those around them. You see it in public transport, shared spaces, customer service, and countless small interactions, in which people appear highly conscious of how their behavior might affect somebody else. It contributes to the order and social cooperation that make many aspects of Japanese life work remarkably well.
There is an important cultural idea underneath this: Maintaining harmony matters.
That principle has obvious value, and this is exactly why Japan makes such an interesting NoRuleBook case study. Unwritten rules are not necessarily irrational restrictions imposed on people for no reason; some exist because they solve real problems. A society in which people routinely consider how their actions affect others can function very differently from one in which individual preference consistently takes priority.
But a strength can become restrictive when the same instinct is carried into situations where disagreement, disruption or standing apart may actually be necessary.
If maintaining harmony becomes more important than questioning a poor decision, the cost of disagreement rises. If avoiding inconvenience to colleagues makes it difficult to leave before everyone else, personal consideration begins influencing working hours. If standing apart from the group carries a social penalty, people may become less willing to suggest something unfamiliar even when they believe it could work better.
The problem is not consideration itself. It is what happens when consideration for other people quietly becomes an obligation to behave like them.
This is where the distinction between written and unwritten rules becomes especially important. A company can introduce a policy encouraging employees to leave work earlier, take holidays or contribute new ideas, but a written policy does not automatically change what happens when someone actually does those things. If colleagues still interpret leaving first as a lack of commitment, taking all your leave as inconsiderate or challenging a senior person’s idea as disrespectful, the unwritten rule can remain more powerful than the written one.
Changing that kind of rule is difficult precisely because there is often nobody enforcing it. Everyone can simply be responding to what they believe everyone else expects.
And that leads to one of the most interesting questions in this entire article:
and how many survive because everyone assumes everyone else does?
It would be easy to turn these changes into a familiar story about a younger generation rejecting the values of the one before it, but that would oversimplify what is happening in Japan and repeat exactly the mistake NoRuleBook is supposed to challenge.
Japan is not abandoning loyalty, stability, hard work or consideration for others, nor is there any obvious reason it should. These values have helped create institutions, workplaces and communities that function extremely well in many respects, and replacing them wholesale with greater individualism would simply exchange one set of assumptions for another.
What appears to be changing is the weight those expectations carry.
Loyalty can still matter without requiring someone to remain with one employer regardless of what they receive in return. Hard work can still be admired without treating time spent at a desk as the best evidence of commitment. Security can remain valuable without automatically making the most established career the correct one, while consideration for others can remain deeply embedded in Japanese culture without requiring people to suppress every disagreement that might disturb the group.
Seen this way, Japan’s changing unwritten rules are not really a story about rebellion at all. They are a story about recalibration.
The economic and social conditions that supported some of Japan’s post-war expectations have changed considerably. Its population is ageing, employers are competing for workers, technology is changing the skills companies need, and the government itself is trying to encourage greater entrepreneurship and labor mobility. When the environment changes, rules that once fitted that environment inevitably come under pressure.
Some will survive because the principle underneath them remains valuable. Others will evolve because the old way of applying that principle no longer works as well. A few may eventually disappear because the conditions that made them useful have disappeared too.
That is not uniquely Japanese. Every society has rules that become so familiar they stop looking like rules. Japan simply makes the process particularly visible because some of its expectations around work, loyalty, harmony and security have historically been so deeply embedded.
The lesson from Japan isn’t that tradition should give way to individual freedom, or that younger workers are right and older generations were wrong. Those conclusions would reduce a complicated cultural change to another simplistic rule about how people ought to live.
The more useful lesson is that :
A rule can have served people well and still deserve to be questioned
That distinction sits at the heart of NoRuleBook. We often treat questioning a convention as an accusation that the convention was foolish, restrictive or wrong from the beginning, when sometimes nothing of the sort is true. A rule may have been entirely sensible for the world in which it developed and gradually become less useful as that world changed around it.
Japan’s traditional employment system offered security when security was part of a powerful bargain between company and employee. Its emphasis on harmony helped people cooperate in a densely populated society. Loyalty strengthened organizations, while consideration for others contributed to an everyday social order that remains one of the country’s most noticeable qualities.
The question is not whether those values should disappear. It is whether the way they are expressed should remain fixed simply because that is how they have always been expressed.
That question extends far beyond Japan. The rules we inherit about careers, education, money, relationships, retirement and success can all outlive some of the circumstances that originally made them sensible. The challenge is learning to preserve what remains valuable without becoming trapped by the form it took in the past.
The strongest traditions don't need to be protected from questioning. They need to be strong enough to survive it.
Many of the rules shaping our lives are never written down. We absorb them from families, workplaces, cultures and the people around us until following them begins to feel natural, even when we have never consciously decided that they make sense for us.
The NoRuleBook eBook is about recognising those unwritten rules and deciding which ones still deserve a place in your life. It isn’t about rejecting tradition or breaking rules simply to be different. It is about understanding why a rule exists, what value it still provides and whether following it remains a conscious choice rather than an inherited habit.
If you want to start identifying and questioning more of the unwritten rules shaping your own life, click the NoRuleBook image below to get your copy.
-
-20%
NoRuleBook
Original price was: $9.95.$7.95Current price is: $7.95. -
-50%
No Rules Start-Up
Original price was: $19.95.$9.95Current price is: $9.95. -
-35%
NoRuleBook Bundle
Original price was: $22.90.$14.95Current price is: $14.95.
Submitted 1.0
Manual 5.0
