Are there any studios with good working conditions? I've heard a lot of horror stories about how animation studios don't treat their employees very well (or just Japan's corporate culture in general), giving animators poverty wages, overworking them and stressing them out to the point where some commit suicide (there's even a word for that, which I don't remember). Apparantly, animators are treated like dirt over there, even though the bulk of the work comes from them. Is there any truth to that? And if yes, are there any studios with good working conditions? I'm talking mainly about pay, reasonable work schedules and good compensation.
In ANN there is an article, written by Jennifer Sherman, which talks about the financial and working condition 
issues present in the Anime industry. More specifically, the article talks about a specific episode from a NHK program called Close-Up Gendai+.

Below are quotes from the ANN article which talk about the financial and working condition issues that were aired on that specific episode,



  NHK's Close-Up Gendai+ program aired an episode about the dark side of the anime industry on Wednesday. The episode discussed the
  financial  problems of the industry and exposed animators' subpar
  working conditions. Anime director Yasuhiro Irie (Fullmetal Alchemist:
  Brotherhood,  Code:Breaker), Toray Corporate Business Research
  representative Naoki Atsumi, and announcers Shinichi Taketa and Izumi
  Tanaka appeared on  the program.


  The episode showed a graph of increasing annual profits in the anime industry. The small yellow bars represent the portion that
  anime
  studios  receive. Because production committees hold IP licenses, as
  well as merchandising and distribution rights, profits from anime
  productions fail  to reach studios. 
  
  


  A 30-minute work requires more than 3,000 illustrations. In-between animators receive about 200 yen (US$2) per illustration
  and can
  produce  a maximum of 20 pages per day. Therefore, they can only
  expect to earn about 100,000 yen (US$911) per month.


  Japan Animation Creators Association (JAniCA) reported in 2015 that animators averaged 11 working hours per day, and they had just
     four
  days  off per month.


  An animator who left his job due to work-related depression kept an overtime log. He reported having 100 overtime hours in one month. 
  The
  below image shows that the animator started work at 11:30 a.m. on May
  22 and finished at 5:10 a.m. on May 23.
  
  


  Production I.G co-founder, president, and CEO Mitsuhisa Ishikawa remarked that the anime industry lacks people with the business
  skills
  to  successfully monetize the system.


  20-year veteran anime technical director Taiki Nishimura reported in May that his monthly income is 100,000 yen (about US$900) for each
  anime  that he works on. He said that he wants to concentrate on one
  anime at a time, but he has to work on two television anime to have
  enough income.


  JAniCA reported in 2015 that 759 animators it surveyed earned an average of 3.3283 million yen (about US$27,689) per year in Japan in
  2013.



An interesting point to note from the article is following,


  The program presented Polygon Pictures as a studio with better operations. The studio, which focuses on 3D animation, turns off its
  lights at 10:00 p.m. to encourage workers to go home.
  
  






There is also another article by Brian Ashcraft, from Kotaku, which details an interview with Thomas Romain, a french animator, and his experience in working in Japan.

Below are quotes from that article that I thought might be useful. Note, I have also highlighted the ones that are relevant to help you answer your question.



  What’s your advice for people who want to work in anime in Japan? 
  
  The first advice I usually give to people is: learn Japanese. Unfortunately finding Japanese production staff who can understand
  English is very rare. You won’t be hired if you cannot communicate
  with them, so if you want to go live in Japan, YOU need to make the
  effort of learning the language.
  
  Second piece of advice is that the sooner you start, the better. Japanese studios prefer to hire young and inexperienced people. You
  don’t need to have a master’s degree in animation; a couple of years
  of basic artistic training is enough to start as junior animator. But
  the consequence is that the pay is very low. It’s better to consider
  this period as a long internship during which you will be taught by a
  senpai while working on ongoing productions. It’s good to be aware
  that drawing skills are not required to work in this industry. You can
  work as a production assistant, editor, or compositing artist for
  example. None of these jobs require knowing how to draw, even if you
  want to become a director. Lots of anime directors started as
  production assistants and never went to art schools.
  
  The third piece of advice is to not come with empty pockets. You will not earn enough to make a living out of it until you become good
  enough. This can take a few years.


  What surprised you about making anime in Japan?
  
  I was surprised by how humble all the anime staff in the studio were, and how terrible their living conditions were, compared to the
  situation in the animation industry in the West. In a nutshell, the
  money don’t flow back to the animators (and other workers)—they are
  poor. Most of them spend most of their lives sat at their desks and
  are single because they have either not enough time or not enough
  money to build a family. Some of them are also extremely shy, like
  they cannot even answer you when you say hello. It can be disturbing
  at first.
  
  But people are very friendly and intrigued to have foreigners amongst them willing to live a similar life. Most of them don’t
  understand
  why we want to work in anime because they are aware that it is a very
  difficult job with low pay and lot of (unpaid) overtime. For us, anime
  is exciting because it’s exotic, but for them it’s just work as
  usual. I do not think they can truly understand our feeling as
  foreigners working in Japan unless they have experienced the fact of
  living outside of Japan themselves, or even travel abroad from time to
  time, which most of them never did because they cannot afford it.
  
  I was also surprised to realize that all the Japanese animators weren’t geniuses. You know, because only masterpieces like Ghibli
  movies or series like Cowboy Bebop were released in France before I
  went to Japan, I thought that every Japanese animator could draw like
  a god. I was wrong. There are animation gods like Toshiyuki Inoue, but
  there are also lots of low-level animators who can only survive in
  this industry because too many shows are produced and studios that are
  desperately looking for staff have no other choice but to offer them
  jobs.
  
  The good thing is that if you are not too bad and have a good work ethic, you will never be unemployed.


  What’s the most difficult thing about working in the anime industry?
  
  Definitely the large quantity of work to deal with in a short time period. I was surprised by how short the production schedules
  are and
  how scarce the teams are due to the shortage of artists. Studios are
  open 24/7, and people are also working on the holidays most of the
  time. You get emails during the night. It’s totally normal to have
  meetings during the night or the weekends. You really have to be ready
  to work hard, to reach the same level of commitment as your Japanese
  co-worker, otherwise the risk is that they may not accept you as one
  of them.
  
  I was surprised by the number of production miracles. Japanese have the ability to achieve impossible tasks very quickly, only when
  they
  have no other choices left. Although it would be more reasonable to
  refuse those conditions, everybody complies. This is actually how it
  works all the time. Nothing moves according to the initial planning.
  It’s only when everybody thinks that there is no time left, that the
  project will never be completed in time, that production speeds up.
  People work day and night without wasting a single minute until the
  very last second. When you go see a movie on its release day or watch
  an anime on TV, people were still working on it a few days ago, or
  even a few hours ago. Sometimes it’s not even finished, and the
  drawings are polished for the DVD/Blu-ray release.


  What industry horror stories have you heard?
  
  It’s not only that I’ve heard horror stories, I’ve seen them. Basically, most of the people are overworked. The problem is that in
  the traditional Japanese way to behave in society, people tend to say
  yes when they are asked to work under impossible conditions. For the
  sake of the studio and the project team, they will do the impossible,
  even stay several days at the studio in a row, and therefore put their
  own health at risk. I’ve seen people going home only once per week, or
  working 35 hours in a row. I’ve even met an animation director who was
  going home only once per year to their parents—she wasn’t renting an
  apartment. She was living at the studio, using the public bath and
  manga cafes to rest a little bit from time to time. A married couple,
  a director and his wife character designer, were camping in a corner
  of the studio, sleeping in sleeping bags until the production was
  finished. Some people also don’t allow themselves to take a break even
  if they are sick, because they don’t want to spend their small wage on
  health care.
  
  Life expectancy amongst animators isn’t very old. I’ve seen people passing out at work. The worst has been people dying from
  karoshi
  (death by overwork). One of my colleagues died from a stroke 10 years
  ago while he was working in a different studio (staff working for
  several companies at a time is rather common). Another one barely
  recovered from a severe stroke as well. Recently I’ve heard of the
  death of an animator working on a pretty famous show in another
  studio, but everybody kept it secret, probably not to damage the
  company. 
  
  This said, people are very friendly to each other, because basically everybody knows they are more or less experiencing the same
  very hard conditions. People share the same fate, working in this
  terrible industry but doing a work that they deeply love. Work
  meetings are fun. We are laughing a lot and enjoying creating
  anime.







From what I have researched, I can somewhat say that there are probably only some studios which have a bit more better working conditions than other studios. But, overall, I think most studios have subpar working condition and some even lower.