ZEENAT MOORAD: Japan slowly learns the upside to downtime
The country is tackling karoshi — death by overwork, an epidemic decades in the making
Do you know what’s really big in Japan (besides green tea KitKats and caramel Doritos)? Overtime. A Japanese woman died last year after logging 159 hours of overtime in a single month. The country’s work culture is characterised by excessive overtime. There is even a term for death brought on by spending too much time at work. Suicide, heart failure or stroke triggered by overwork all fall within the ambit of karoshi — an officially recognised cause of death. A white paper released last year found that one in five people in Japan work an average of 49 hours or more each week. Most karoshi victims are male and in their 30s and 40s, by the way. Japanese employees work significantly longer hours than their counterparts in other developed countries. Roughly 22% work more than 49 hours a week, compared with 16% of workers in the US and 11% in France and Germany. South Korea’s corporate foot soldiers fare worse, at 35%. I must make two quite important points here. First, the problem has b...
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