The Company Is Father. The Company Is Mother.
The slice of contemporary Japanese life of keenest interest to you is dominated by one particular relationship: that of the Japanese salaryman to his employer. If you understand this relationship, it is almost a Rosetta stone. You’ll immediately be able to predict true things about the world like “Japanese startups probably have huge difficulties in hiring.” (About which, more later.)
A salaryman (transliterated from the Japanese which is itself borrowed from English), more formally a “full-time company employee” (正社員), is the local equivalent of a W-2 employee in America. This is roughly 1/3rd of the labor force in Japan, but it has outsized societal impact.
Traditionally, salarymen (and they are, by the way, mostly men) are hired into a particular company late in university and stay at that company or its affiliates until they retire.
There are other workers at Japanese companies — contract employees, who can be (and are) let go at will, or young ladies on the “pink collar” track who are encouraged tacitly or explicitly to quit to get married or raise children — but the salaryman/employer relationship is the beating heart of the high-productivity Japanese private sector. (The Japanese economy is roughly 1/3rd the public sector, 1/3rd low-productivity firms like restaurants or traditional craftsmen, and 1/3rd high-productivity household-name megacorps. Salarymen are mostly present in the last one, which happens to dovetail with your professional interests.)
The salaryman/employer relationship is best characterized as “You swear yourself to us, body and soul, and in return we will isolate you from all risks.”