Being worked to death
might be a punchline to a joke for most Americans. But in Japan, it’s a real and serious issue as hundreds die every year from working scores of hours of overtime.
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-yearold 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.
Despite efforts over the past two decades to cut back on overwork, karoshi still causes hundreds of deaths and illnesses every year in Japan. In August 2015, labor authorities caught Dentsu exceeding its own 70-hour monthly 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,” Dentsu said in a statement.
But at Dentsu and many other companies, much overtime goes unreported, labor officials say.
On top of the 40-hour work week the Labor Standards Law sets for most workers, companies can establish voluntary ceilings for overtime. That make 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 to work extra-long 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.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government wants companies to drastically cut working hours to enable men to help out more at home and create more job opportunities for women. But that strategy appears to be making little headway.
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.
Asked during parliamentary questioning about Takahashi’s death, the third officially acknowledged case of “karoshi” at Dentsu, Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare Yasuhisa Shiozaki threatened harsh action against the company.
“It is extremely regrettable that the lesson was not learned and yet another young employee ended up committing suicide at the same company because of long working hours,” he said.