The Health of the Japanese Workforce

Any outsider – on finding out the working hours of the average Japanese worker might assume that the Japanese working population are a haggard, work weary, sleep deprived, aged group of souls who have lost touch with the true meaning of life.
But the reality is startlingly opposite to that. The Japanese nation, on average, to my eyes is a picture of health and vitality. After being at the office until god-knows-what hour being busybusy, teaching classes, team-teaching with me, with A LOT of energy and enthusiasm, staying late doing things I would never know about, meeting parents, running tea ceremony club and all the rest, my supervisor heads home for about 9 pm. There she will be responsible for cooking her son, hers and her husband’s dinner, and doing the housework, before heading for bed, and then getting up at 5 am the next morning, for another similarly relentless day. This is what I can gather is my supervisors daily routine, and probably has been all of her adult life. (Except up until this year she ran tennis club for 2-3 hours every day after school and 4 hours on weekend days – she stopped this to be able to spend more time with her son because of his stage in the last year of junior high – a key year). My supervisor is a vision of health. She is energetic – running around the teachers room, always. She is hysterical – always laughing out loud. I never really see her trudge around with tiredness. And it is the same with many other teachers. This hardcore intense lifestyle seems to suit them in some unfathomable way to me. How they manage to keep it up is a mystery to. Maybe it`s something in that rice that they eat.
But – I`ve been eating Japanese rice for nearly 3 months now and I still trudge around. It is indeed a mystery. I wonder if I will ever discover it …