For Japanese Linguist, a Long and Lonely Schlep (2012)

Tangentially related: there's a good recent Japanese film, available with English subtitles, called The Great Passage. It includes two intertwined love stories, one between a man and a woman and one between two men and their magnum opus, a new comprehensive Japanese dictionary, which takes decades to complete.

Highly recommended if, for nothing else, a window into why at least some salarymen feel like their sacrifices are worth it.

The film also explicitly asks and answers the question of why a publisher would fund a decades-long quest to produce a work with very limited commercial appeal (which this article might set you to wondering about): they're willing to subsidize certain prestige projects with rent from being in the elite fraternity of Japanese publishing houses, and capability of publishing new dictionaries is a status marker for that. There are limits to this largesse and they come a key subplot to the movie.

Jack halpern is quite an interesting character and I feel the article sells him short when introducing him as a Japanese resident who speaks Yiddish.

He has worked on one of the major Japanese character dictionaries as editor in chief and his company leases out databases of Chinese, Japanese and Korean character and this data is used by many of the major publishers of dictionaries. He has also published over 16 books. The guy is no stranger to the hard work required to build such a dictionary.

More over he founded the unicycle foundation, which is responsible for the World Cup of unicycling.