I don’t know that it is the primary factor, honestly. Jobs keep moving to places like Tokyo where daycare has a lottery system and is super expensive if one doesn’t get into the free one. Add to that that, since corona and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, prices for a lot of things have gone up leading to a cost of living crisis. for many as wages stay stagnant.

Indeed, there was an election yesterday and these were some things that were being mentioned by politicians in the lead-up. In Tokyo, it looks like they are trying to make daycare and school tuition free, which would be a big help. Several schools have even had trouble properly providing meals lately because of the sudden rising costs of food (fees for school are paid at the beginning of the school year so schools have to budget for higher prices and will have worse meals at the beginning to avoid having money for none at the end). Even the far-right anti-foreigner party ran on some kind of payments for kids. Another party talked about getting things less centralized in Tokyo and trying to spread the population out or at least support hose that remain in the countryside.

As for why it wasn’t faster, rules have been on the books forever, but people and culture make it different. People feel huge pressure not to make waves so they will clock out and continue working. The more recent legislation has actually addressed this and put some responsibility on the worker themself in my understand, which may help. Corona also showed people what could be and many were angry when forced to go back to the old status quo (and one can see comments about people’s manners and patience on the train and other places getting worse in the time since). There’s also what is called “power harassment” and the like and lots of old, entitled fuckheads in positions of power at companies who think they are untouchable and, thankfully, are slowly going away.