Overwork deaths still plaguing Japan
Workplace culture means overtime is rarely refused
TOKYO — Matsuri Takahashi’s dream career at Japan’s top ad agency, Dentsu, ended with her suicide as her overtime pushed past 100 hours a month.
“I’m emotionless and only wish to sleep,” she wrote, exhausted and depressed, in a Twitter post in October 2015, six months after starting the job. On Christmas Day, the 24-year-old leaped from a dormitory balcony, leaving behind a last email to her mother saying her work and life had become unbearable.
Takahashi’s was not the first “karoshi,” or death from overwork at Dentsu, a company notorious for demanding long hours from its employees.
Despite efforts over the past two decades to cut back on overwork, karoshi still causes hundreds of deaths and illnesses every year in Japan, affecting all sorts of workers, from elite “salaryman and career-woman” employees like Takahashi to IT technicians and manual labourers.
In August 2015, labour authorities caught Dentsu exceeding its own 70-hour monthly maximum overtime limit and ordered it to cut back.
Asked for comment, Dentsu said that as of October 2015, nobody was reporting overtime exceeding 70 hours. It now limits overtime to 50 hours a month. “We will keep trying to manage work appropriately, to curb long hours of work and maintain employees’ health,” said a Dentsu statement.
But at Dentsu and many other companies, much overtime goes unreported, labour officials say.
On top of the 40-hour work week the Labour Standards Law sets for most workers, companies can establish voluntary ceilings for overtime. This exception serves as a loophole that makes the law toothless, experts say.
In Japan’s male-dominated, hierarchical corporate world, company interests tend to come first. Employees, especially young, foreign or female workers, are ill-placed to resist pressure from higher-ups to work extralong hours or take on too much work.
“Overtime is supposed to be for unanticipated occasions, but in Japan, it’s become expected as part of daily duties that nobody can refuse,” said Kansai University professor Koji Morioka, a labour expert. “People are chronically working long hours because they have too much work to do as staff sizes have shrunk.”
Takahashi’s case became public after the government recently recognized her suicide as “karoshi.”
“I’m on duty again Saturday-Sunday. I just want to die,” she tweeted in November 2015. By December she was getting only two hours of sleep a day.
A survey of 10,000 companies published in Japan’s first white paper on karoshi, released this month, found that overtime at more than 20 per cent exceeded the 80-hour-per-month threshold for overwork.
In 2015 alone, 93 suicides and attempted suicides were officially recognized as overwork deaths and eligible for compensation and 96 deaths from heart attacks, strokes and other illnesses were linked to overwork, it said. It listed 1,515 cases of workers or families seeking compensation for overwork-related mental problems.
More than one in five Japanese work an average of 49 hours or longer each week, compared with 16.4 per cent in the United States, 12.5 per cent in Britain and 10.1 per cent in Germany.
“Someone tell me why my daughter had to die,” Takahashi’s mother, Yukimi, said after winning an undisclosed amount of compensation for her daughter, whose name means “Festival.”
“I wish someone had taken steps sooner when she was still alive.”