^ yeah, from what I read, they generally cut the time students compulsory spend in school. I would think the schedule was more or less the same case in Korea (at least in the 1980-90s dramas I’ve watched haha), where even though classes technically end in the afternoon, students would stay late at school until 9/10/11pm ish for individual study including Saturdays, which is supervised by a teacher. Since that was abolished, I guess that’s why cram school is now a thing over there to “compensate” since the academic standards don’t seem to have exactly relaxed either 
but also, because of the abolition, those from the older generation think that the yutori generation have lesser academic ability / “snowflake” tendencies 
edit: on a sidenote, I just learned the 「棋」kanji and 「将棋」 makes much more sense now
(commanding chess pieces cool cool)