Tokyo Wants People to Go to Work Earlier to Ease Train Crush

I've long been wondering why anyone would require (or accept) workin hours so inflexible that they force the employee to be stuck in traffic for some of the precious off-time. It might have made more sense way-back-when most work was mechanical, oriented around production lines or such, but for a society mostly consisting of office jobs, flattening out the rush hours seems like a total no-brainer to me.

Being in academia I'm lucky to have pretty flexible hours, and just going half an hour before/after peak hours really saves time or (in my case, since I commute by bike) nerves.