The term 'culture' is a multifaceted concept, notoriously difficult to define. Without writing an extended preface defining the concept, it should be obvious that the culture surrounding the organisation of work in Japan has evolved in ways inseparable from the whole process of Japan's economic development. After the Meiji Restoration in the late 1860s, the challenge of industrialisation as a national issue focused attention on the relationship between social and economic development both as structural change and as cultural change. The nexus between culture and structure in development received concerted international attention as Japan re-emerged on the world stage, first in the 1960s in the Princeton series on the modernisation of Japan, then circa 1970 in the admonitions warning about Japan's threat to Western economies and ways of life, and finally in the 'learn-from-Japan' campaign from the late 1970s until the economic 'bubble' burst in the early 1990s. This chapter pays attention to ways decisions made by Japanese regarding work are set in a larger socioeconomic context in line with the argument of Mouer and Kawanishi that the long hours worked by many Japanese are more likely to reflect the way structural parameters delimit the choices in the labour market (e.g. by a work ethos or milieu) than by a value in work per se. It begins with an overview of the development problematic - the historic movement of labour to new industries in ways that generate economic surplus and set up a class-based dynamic.