In this case it's a video game industry thing, not a Japanese thing. There are very few game devs who don't expect crazy hours in crunch, and that's only relatively recently that people have started pushing back.
It's just that Polyphony's crunch is probably going to be at least a year long. I imagine it was crunch for at least a couple months before they announced the delay, and will have been since then. And it's funny, because everyone knows that you actually get less productivity out of crunch work schedules unless it's for a very, very short time frame.
60 hours a week pretty quickly means that people are so tired that they take 60 hours to do 40 hours of work. 80 hours a week just means people essentially burn out. There are exceptional people who can do those sorts of hours, but they're few and far between.
If Polyphony really are still doing the whole sleeping under the desks thing that they're so proud of, it's no wonder that their employees are too tired to think straight. That'd be a horrible environment to work in.
