Very well said, I think you're right on the money.

And when I say crazy I didn't mean party crazy but more like emotionally unstable and wildly jealous etc...

i agree with that in my experience the quiet cute ones are the scary ones, the loud in your face ones are mostly bark and no bite, but yeh ive heard from alot of western men with asian women that they prefer the 'streotypical' stay at home wife (that us western women 99.9% of the time arent!) but alot of asian women have broken out of also now

Do you mean asian women in western cultures? or asian women in asia?
Here my friends say that when Japan was in an economic bubble everyone wanted to go to work and get rich, and being a housewife wasn't such a nice prospective, but that now a days when the economy is down most young women hope to be housewives again...

But in the 80s women were not getting rich in the workplace.

That's right, but it was a desire, and it was a beginning for women to want to enter society in a way other than as a housewife (I'm paraphrasing what my gf is saying she noticed, btw), especially in the 90's.
She seems to be saying that int he 80's it sparked a desire to leave the house-wife world and enter the business world, which was otherwise unheard of. And then in the 90's it was starting to occur a lot more often, and then that now a days it's not as popular among the younger generation as it was a decade ago.

Was it? Despite the fact that families were making crazy amounts of money, men were still working 60+ hours weeks. I was too young to be of working age in the 80s, but I did go to Japan a couple times, and my impression was that women were VERY happy taking advantage of their husbands' companies' good fortunes. It was (and still is) the secretaries that get to go on 10 day vacations. The men have a hard time getting more than a day off in a row. I have never heard anyone say they envied the salaryman of the 80s, or especially the 90s, after the bubble burst.

According to my gf, women just wanted to work alongside men, and that "Japanese people don't really think of working hours the same way westerners do". Women just wanted to have what they didn't have at the time (the grass is greener on the other side 隣の芝は青い), and now that they have it and it's commonplace, it's not so attractive a prospect.
She also says that seeing western women becoming more assertive in the workplace was also a motivation to Japanese women.
I'm kind of mediating this idea, my scope of knowledge isn't as broad as hers so I ask her lol.

It is interesting, and I hope other people comment on it.

Why did women want to work alongside men? Men had no time off, spent only a few hours a day at home, were forced to go out drinking with their bosses on a nightly basis, and smoked, drank and stressed themselves to early graves.

What I understand is that marriage was seen as essentially a door closing that would never be opened again. Many women were happy being home-makers and stay-at-home moms, but some women began asking "What if?"

What if I could study abroad and come back and make a career out of that? What if I could find success doing something I loved? Am I ready for my single life and freedom to end?

I am curious as to where they were seeing western women in the workplace, and how that became an inspiration.

Honestly I'd also like to see other people's opinions on this, it wouldn't be the first time my gf was wrong about something :P

I'm also curious about it,
I can speculate though;
I'd say in moves is where they see the strong western women.
I'd say that the life of a salaryman might have seemed glamorous to an outsider.
I'd say the comfortable life of a housewife might seem dull to some.
Those are just speculations though, and my gf is too young to know for sure, does anyone know for sure?

My opinion is that there are many observations of Japanese society that contradict each other and that the chances of reaching a complete consensus on anything apart from the most general phenomena is zero.

From where I'm sitting there are probably elements in your and MMM's observations that are valid. Perhaps some of the conclusions you've both come to though could need some reevaluating. But again.. I don't know.

I went to uni in Japan and to me it seemed career was important to women as much as it was for men.

Not one woman I met planned to be a housewife.

Whether that represents or says anything about Japanese society.. I wouldn't know.