Japan vows no more deaths from overwork while building Olympic arena

TOKYO: A Japanese sports official promised yesterday to work with the builder of a showpiece stadium for the 2020 Olympics to stamp out ‘death by overwork’, a designation authorities applied last week to the suicide of a stadium worker.

The parents of the 23-year-old petitioned the government this year to recognise his suicide as ‘karoshi’ or ‘death by overwork’, with media saying he had worked 200 hours of overtime a month before his death.

“To our regret, illegal overtime was recognised as a result of inspection by the labour ministry,” said Tadashi Mochizuki, director of stadium manager the Japan Sport Council (JSC), which is part of a joint venture with construction firm Taisei Corp.

“We, JSC and Taisei, took it sincerely and we’ll do the utmost (to comply with the law) in proceeding with construction.”

Authorities unveiled a model of the new stadium in the Japanese capital, which is set to be completed in November 2019, after construction begun in December 2016.

Japan’s fast-ageing society has left employers grappling with an acute labour shortage.

It officially recognises two types of ‘karoshi’: cardiovascular illness linked to overwork, and suicide following mental stress related to work.

Employers face few curbs on overtime and pay, so that more than a fifth of company staff exceeded a government overtime threshold of 80 hours a month, a white paper showed in 2016.

The trend was spotlighted by a high-profile death from overwork in 2015 at advertising giant Dentsu Inc.