Step into Fast Retailing’s corporate headquarters, just a stone’s throw from the famed Budokan sumo arena in central Tokyo, and it becomes immediately apparent why -- true to their name -- the company is helping pioneer Japan’s shift to saner working hours.

The staff is young, with a surfeit of 20- and 30-somethings -- Japan’s Me generation. The mildly counter-culture feel to the office is heightened by its Casual Friday dress code, observed every day of the week. (Since the company makes and sells cheap chic, this is one of the few places in Japan where you can’t get busted for showing up in cargo pants and a t-shirt.) Many of these employees are refugees from other companies, giving Fast Retailing an even more “cosmopolitan” hue than the standard white-shoe, Japanese lifetime employment company.

But the ballast behind Fast Retailing’s work-life balance campaign is its maverick founder and CEO, Tadashi Yanai. Yanai has juiced some lemons in the past (an ill-thought-out venture into fruit and vegetable sales; hasty and failed initial launches overseas) but in trying to get his staff to learn the merits of working to live, rather than the other way around, he’s on solid footing.

The most curious thing, to me, was his rationale for adopting a work schedule. Fast Retailing has long made no secret of its global hoop dreams (its original store design was modeled after Old Navy’s warehouse-style outlets, and the company used to boast it would one day overtake Gap as the world’s hip apparel retailer) and says it frets that long work hours would mar its image abroad and discourage potential recruits in foreign countries. Huh? Why not adopt shorter and smarter work hours simply because it makes sense -- for their existing core Japanese employees?

Perhaps it’s a measure of how hard it is to sell change in this conservative nation, even among workers born amidst affluence. The experiment continues.