The Japanese weren't always workaholics. Once upon a time, work had its place and knew its place. It didn't swallow life whole. Other pursuits were given their due. People worked without being consumed by work.
Author Jiro Asada, writing in PHP magazine (April), refers us to the Edo Period (1603-1868). "Even for samurai," he writes, "work was daytime activity." Day done, work was laid aside. Free time beckoned — the public bath, the theater, the glittering pleasure quarters where sex was an art and a commodity, one among many, as crude or elegant as your tastes and budget commanded.
You retired at 40. The word Asada uses, inkyo, suggests a passage from active to contemplative life — a "second life" qualitatively different from the first: deeper than mere leisure, loftier than a second career.