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What the law changed, and what moved the atmosphere
The 働き方改革関連法 came into force from April 2019 and did something Japan had not done before: it put a legal ceiling on overtime with penalties attached — in principle forty-five hours a month and three hundred and sixty a year, with narrow exceptions — where previously the limit had been a figure in an agreement that everybody overshot. The same package obliged employers to make sure each worker actually takes at least five days of paid leave a year, which sounds small and was not, because the problem was never entitlement but the awkwardness of using it. Separately, in 2018 the ministry rewrote its model work rules so that the default assumption about a second job flipped from prohibited to permitted, which is why 副業 is now a form you file rather than a thing you hide. Remote work arrived on its own schedule in 2020, surged, and then partly receded, and the receding is the interesting part: the scheme usually survived while the use of it did not, which is the 導入 and 定着 gap exactly. Underneath all of it sits the thing 中村 names. Japan's working-age population has been shrinking for three decades, 人手不足 is chronic and worst in the industries that can least afford it, and an employer who cannot replace people has to keep them. Lifetime employment and seniority pay are eroding, nearly all couples under forty are 共働き, men's parental leave has gone from a few percent to roughly a third in a decade, and employers are now expected to make provision for work up to seventy. None of that happened because the argument was won. It happened because there was nobody else to do the work.