One Japanese television commercial sings, “Can you fight 24 hours for your corporation?” In America the words might elicit laughs or the response, “Would you want to?” For the Japanese white- or blue-collar worker, however, long hours with unpaid overtime are a matter of course, with relief only available through the now ubiquitous karoshi: death from overwork.
The karoshi phenomenon was first brought to public attention in the 1960’s with the death of a 29-year old employed in the shipping department of Japan’s largest newspaper company. Though the term was only coined in 1982 by the writers of a study on the burgeoning phenomenon, it is clear that cases of premature death by overwork have been on the rise since that first reported instance, with perhaps 10,000 or more karoshi deaths annually by the mid-1990’s. The problem, compounded by ingrained Confucian philosophy and decades of post-war recovery zeal, has reached a fever pitch, but with media attention now waning for several years, managerial negligence and government apathy continue unchecked.
In the former category of abuse, Japan’s “lean production” technique garners international praise as it sends thousands of victims to the grave each year. While those speculating on the karoshi trend initially assumed the instances of cardiovascular failure and stroke to be symptomatic of Type-A personalities, a dearth of cases among managers compared to the workers they managed pointed to the obvious: that long, intensive hours of work, over several or many years, were reason enough for premature death.
To illustrate the Japanese model of work, some statistics may be helpful. While weekly work hours have mostly decreased in Western countries since WWII, in Japan the trend has been an increase in hours, with Japanese working 236 hours more per year than Americans. This number may look deceptively low: most Japanese also commute over two hours per day, as affordable housing is only available in outlying suburbs. The number of Japanese working more than 60 hours a week grew from 15% in 1977 to 24% in 1988. Overtime work is often 2 hours or more per day, almost always unpaid, and always expected. Refusal of overtime work, “voluntary” work, weekend work, or furoshiki zangyou (“wrapped work”, or homework), may easily end in dismissal from the job. Even when the expectations of one’s employer are unreasonable, the worker has little recourse; in Japan’s vertical Confucian system of ethics, roles are set and superiors may not be defied. In any case, the employee needs to keep his or her job.
Such long hours might not have the toll on certain prospective karoshi victims if it were not for the Industrial Age-throwback known as lean production. In brief, this modern work management method involves formulating units of time for each movement in factory work, and expecting each line worker to work continuously under that formula. As Nishiyama (1997) astutely puts it, ” Under this new production method, the worker resembles a mouse running helplessly in a rotating wheel in order to avoid electric shock, rather than a working human.” One 45-year old karoshi victim was working under this “new” system at the Mazda Motor Company in 1979. He died after 13 consecutive days of work, including 6 successive night shifts.
The final stage of the grim karoshi experience, at least for the family, is often one of frustrated attempts at compensation. The Japanese Ministry of Labor has set in place requisite levels of work so high that only 20 to 60 cases may be awarded compensation per year. To demonstrate, the case of one 42-year old truck driver who had worked 5,700 hours per year was determined not to merit recompense. Why? Simply because the victim involved had worked hours fairly normal for truck drivers. Typically victims are required to have worked 24 or more consecutive hours before death, or at least seven consecutive 16-hour days. Finally claimants are required to prove that the victim was involved in extremely burdensome work, or was injured, in the 24 hours before death. The Japanese government is clearly not interested in awarding money to the families of those who died merely from an institutionalized extreme work ethic, or, moreover, in recognizing that such an ethic may be at fault.
As many as 10,000 Japanese men and women die each year from overwork; overwork continues as one of the myriad expectations of a vertical society. The media turns its eye to other sensational issues. Yet quietly, in the years of the new millennium, the word karoshi has entered English dictionaries, suggesting a near-universal understanding of a problem that has clearly made its way beyond the islands of Japan.
Works Cited
Nishiyama, Katsuo and Jeffrey V. Johnson. Karoshi-Death from overwork: Occupational health consequence of the Japanese production management.” International Journal of Health Services 04 February 1997.
