Japan: Karoshi - so tired that you want to die

By Todd Crowell

TOKYO

In the spring of 2015 Matsuri Takahashi, 24, joined the Dentsu advertising agency -- one of the Japan’s most prestigious, but also demanding, corporations -- as a young recruit.

Within a few months she was complaining to friends how exhausted she was.

“I want to die” she confided in a social media message. And on Christmas day she did just that, throwing herself from the roof of the company dormitory where she lived.

Almost one year later to the day, the president of Dentsu, Tadashi Ishii, 65, appeared at a press conference Dec. 28, bowing deeply in remorse and announcing that he would resign as corporate president early in the new year.

He fulfilled the promise last week.

“We deeply regret failing to prevent the overwork of our new recruit, and I offer my sincere apology,” Ishii, he said.

Although we took various counter measures, the issue of overwork has not improved, he added.

The Takahashi suicide, which reverberated through 2016, threw a light on one of the darker corners of Japanese society -- death from overwork, or to use the sinister sounding Japanese term “karoshi”.

It is generally considered that the benchmark for karoshi is 80 hours of overtime or weekend work per month.

Takahashi complained that she was forced to work for more than 100 hours of overtime. Sometimes she got only 10 hour of sleep a week.

Not all of the karoshi cases, however, are so dramatic or so unambiguous. Sometimes it involves a seemingly perfectly healthy person (usually a man) in the prime of life who unaccountably dies from a heart attack or a stroke.

Karoshi entered the vocabulary in the 1980s, a time when Japan Inc. seemed like the economic juggernaut that would conquer the world, powered by tens of thousands of worker bees, known as "salarymen", willing to put in long hours for the good of the company.

At one time the Japanese workaholic ethic was seen by trading partners, such as the United States, as practically an unfair trade practice. Washington and other advisors pressured Japan to take more holidays.

To some extent Tokyo took these complaints to heart. Japan now boasts more holidays (15) than practically any other developed country, with at least one (and sometimes two) occurring each month.

The former practice of working a half-day on Saturday is also rapidly disappearing.

What hasn’t changed, however, is the fabled Japanese work ethic, with the lights still burning well into the evening at many corporate offices.

One of the measures Dentsu has undertaken is to turn them off by 10 p.m.

Japan’s situation in the world has changed, but not the ethic. Japan may not be the economic world-beater that it was 20 years ago, but even in a stagnant economy there is still serious competition.

And with a declining birth rate, some important sectors of the economy (such as nursing home care, which is facing chronic labor shortages) have had to compensate by putting more work and overtime onto existing staff.

In October, the labor ministry issued a “white paper” on karoshi, saying that under present conditions one worker in five is in danger of death from overwork, which it defines as more than 80 hours of overtime per month.

The Tokyo prosecutors’ office has opened a case against Dentsu, but it is difficult to prove that deaths occurred due to overwork.

There were 2,159 suicides in Japan in 2015, only two of them defined as karoshi -- Takahashi and a Filipino guest worker in a program notorious for abuse.

In December the labor ministry said it would begin releasing names of the companies that abuse overtime rules, on the understanding that if companies cannot be easily prosecuted, then maybe they can be shamed into treating workers better.

In the wake of the Takahashi scandal, more companies are insisting that their employees leave work at a reasonable hour and also take their allotted vacation time.

Tokyo’s new governor, Yuriko Koike has also decreed that no municipal workers can stay at work past 8 p.m.

It will take time, however, to end old habits.

Many Japanese stay at their desks not so much because of the workload per se but because they don’t want their bosses to think that they are slackers.