The overworking problem is being brought to attention as one of the biggest issues in Japan, enough so that they created special terms for it. Karoshi, sudden death (such as heart attack, stroke…) by overworking, and karojisatsu, suicided due to the depression from overworking, both caused over 2000 death in Japan in 2011, and that number is still growing. The first case of this phenomenon was reported in 1969 when a 29-years-old male worker for Japan’s largest newspaper company died of a stroke. In 1982, a book on this issue brought the term into public usage, but it was not until a few years later during the Bubble Economy that the term emerged into public life.  This happened when several prime aged, high-ranking business executives suddenly died without any previous sign of illness. In 2001, a MHLW (Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare) medical commission reported finding a clear connection between Japan’s long work hours and both mental and physical illness. By asking important questions such as; what causes the overworking culture in Japan; what impact does it have on Japan’s society, and what influence does it have globally. Overworking problem need to be stopped as we can work to implement the “Work Life balance” policy to reduce and stop karoshi and karojisatsu. 

The history of modern overworking in Japan can be tracked back to the era between the end of World War II and the Cold War. In order to slow the expansion of the Soviet Union influence in the Pacific, the U.S. government established a significant presence in Japan. The U.S. helped and assisted Japan to rebuild their society and economy. Not only did they think that economic development would prevent Japan from communism, but that it could also prevent militarism revival. During the Korean War, Japan even once became the factory and maintenance base for military purpose of the U.S., which revived the heavy industry. By adding all these factors, the Japanese economic miracle was a record period of economic growth between post-World War II era to the end of Cold War in Japan. Due to the economy miracle, Japanese worked harder and harder, but after the mid 1980s, the Japanese asset price bubble, an economic bubble in Japan in which real estate and stock market prices were greatly inflated, appeared. In 1987, the karoshi phenomenon had been commonly noticed by Japanese people, enough so that Japan’s government started to compile statistics of those deaths which were caused by overworking. In early 1992, this price bubble collapsed. The bubble was characterized by rapid acceleration of asset prices and overheated economic activity, as well as an uncontrolled money supply and credit expansion. More specifically, over-confidence and speculation regarding assets and stock prices had been closely associated with excessive monetary easing policy at the time. However, Japanese people still worked hard after that, and continue to do so.  

Other reasons that cause overworking to grow are the company interval systems and the “morality” of working in Japan. Shushin koyo (term for permanent employment in Japan) and Nenko Joretsu (system of promoting an employee in order of his or her proximity to retirement) were two common systems used by Japanese companies. Shushin koyo is a system that starts with an event called Simultaneous Recruiting of New Graduates, in which a large cohort of recent university graduates all enter a company at once. It gave Japanese workers the important feeling of job security as part of the Japanese management culture, and in turn, elicited a high degree of company loyalty. A high demand for the few available engineers forced companies to bind these employees to the company. The collapse of the Japanese asset price bubble and the following crisis in the 1990s did not weaken this practice. It is still even used in Japanese small businesses. Nenko Joretsu system, also known as seniority-wage system, is a system that guarantees that the longer the workers work in same company, the more salary they get, regardless of their own working skill and ability. These two system make Japanese workers stay in the same company and lower the chance for them quitting their jobs. Plus, Japanese people take hard-working as a virtue. During the economy miracle, they thought it was reasonable and acceptable to sacrifice health to earn a higher payment. That is why the employees were willing to work such a long time. However, after entering the low growth period, Japanese workers started changing their thoughts and reconsidering if it was worth it to work for such a long time.

In 2011, a Japanese “full-time” employee worked on average 1720 hours per year, while an Italian employee worked 1780 hours, and an American employee worked 1790 hours. This may sound paradoxical because as we known, Japan is one of the countries most known for overtime working rather than America and Italy. If this is the case, then how come America and Italy have a longer average working time than Japan? This is because this number only calculates the working time of “full-time” employees, but recently, there are many part-time employees in the Japanese labor market who are not taken into account, which will be discussed later. In 2011, a Japanese full-time employee worked fifty hours a week on average. Compare to 1976 when the average working time for an employee was 47 hours, we can tell that the working time has increased. However, the number of days off that employees receive in a year has increased from 93 days in 1985, to 113 days in 2009. The reason why employees get more days off is because of the universal standard of weekend days off. As previously mentioned, before 1990, due to the highly growth in economy, both employees and employers thought that more working time was better. But after the price bubble collapsed, Japan’s economy came to a low growth period where there was not as much work as before. Also, Japan had been criticized by other countries for working too long, so more and more companies began to let their workers have weekends off. However, even though the workers got more days off, their working time during the week was extended, so they still felt overwhelmed from being overworked. Compared to 1976, male workers’ average sleep time decreased by 4.47 hours and female workers’ average sleep time decreased by 3.05 hours. This caused karoshi and karojisatsu to be viewed even more seriously after 2000.

Overworking greatly effects many aspects of life. Let’s talk about the influence on workers first. As I mentioned, overworking results in less sleeping time, which leads to lower productivity. According to Cobb-Douglas Production function, the working efficiency of workers will go down after working exceeds a certain amount of time. Also, psychology research shows that the results for workers who don’t overwork themselves are a 31% higher working efficiency, 37% higher on sales distribution, and 300% higher on creativity. From an employer’s view, overworking will lower the evaluation of a company. In modern society, social media such as twitter, Facebook, and blogs are very common. It is easy to post any information on the internet for the public to see. So any company letting their employees overwork themselves too much might result in being label as a “black enterprise” by the public. This will result in less people wanting to work for that company. According to a questionnaire (2015), 32.7% of workers want to work happily, 22.8% want to have a good balance between work and life, and only 2.9% care about salary. It will also effect consumer habits. Since the globalizing of the internet, it is almost impossible to keep the company work environment a secret. Consumers have a tendency to avoid buying products or services from the company which they label as “black enterprise”, and instead will make purchases from other companies instead. This will have an obvious and direct influence on company’s profit. For example, a female worker who committed suicide in 2008 was recognized as karojisatsu in 2012, and her company, “Watami” was soon recognized as a black enterprise by the public and saw a 4.4% decrease in sales the following year. Overworking also has a big influence on employees’ family. Yoshie Komuro, whose husband was suffering from overworking, gave a Ted Talk about her experience. After Yoshie gave birth to her first child, it was basically only her taking care of the baby. Her husband always came back after midnight, they had fights and arguments time after time, and it caused her lot of depression. She also mentioned that it made her not want to have a second child because she felt so overwhelmed. This is also a large reason why Japan has such low birth rates compared to other countries.

How does overworking effect Japan’s economy? Does overworking really benefit Japan? The answer is no. The average GDP growth rate from 1956-1973 was 9.1%, from 1974-1990 was 4.2%, and from 1991-2013 was 0.9%. Even with workers in Japan working longer and longer, there is no economic growth. According to the world economy outlook published by the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the economic growth for Japan was 0.9% in 2014 and 0.8% in 2015, while America had a 2.2% growth rate in 2014 and 3.1% in 2015. Among the highly developed countries, we can easily tell that Japan has a low economic growth rate compare to others. 

Not only does this have a national impact, but also on an individual level, workers do not get the right payment that they should have for working overtime. According to an investigation in 2006, Japanese workers worked an average of 2288  hours per person, which was nearly 700 hours more than the EU countries average of 1600, including 408 hours of overtime. However, only about 161 hours of overtime are paid , leaving 247 hours of “service overtime” unpaid. At the average overtime wage of U.S. $19.7, overtime working amounts to a loss of about $5400 per worker per year. Also, stronger cost pressures and labor market deregulations have led employers to sharply increase the hiring of non-regular workers. As a result, the number of non-regular workers increased by 3.97 million from 1997 through early 2004, while 4.32 million regular worker jobs were lost. Non-regular workers are expected to make up any shortfalls without concern for time, and to a surprising degree, their extended hours are worked without being paid. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, if we only look at the data of full-time employees, Japanese average working time is lower than America and Italy, however, if we consider these non-regular workers, Japan then becomes one of the largest overtime working countries. Charles Weathers and Scott North, who studied the case of overworking that happened in Toyota and McDonald in Japan, list out some techniques often used by Japanese companies to avoid paying overtime wages or to extract overtime, both paid and unpaid, from workers. 1) Deny that overtime occurs, or deny responsibility. 2) Assign some tasks on an informal basis so that they are not included in formal work hour calculations. 3) Manipulate employment categories to exempt workers from overtime rules. 4) Set high quotas and leave criteria for evaluation vague. 5) Claim that overtime premiums are included in base pay or that payment of a “management allowance” eliminates need to pay overtime allowances. 6) Purposefully hire too few regular workers and hire a larger proportion of non-regular workers. 7) Inculcate company norms regarding status and productivity. These practices are woven into dense webs of values and constraints that create powerful internal and external pressures on employees to work long hours.

Overworking till death is not only a disaster to workers themselves, but also to those bereaved family. The death of the workers is the initial damage, but there are follow up damages as well. Such as, the financial difficulty of the family of the deceased and the worry, distrust, sadness, anger, pain and the deterioration between interpersonal relationships between relatives. Some families will try to ask for compensation, but there are still difficulties that exist. The first difficulty is the extremely complicated system process. The process is expensive, and takes a very long time to gather all the necessary documents. Not only do they need evidence to prove that the death is caused by overworking, but they also need the opinions of the deceased one’s boss, colleague, and doctor. The process is so complicated that almost no one can successfully receive compensation. Another difficulty is the pressure from asking for compensation. The pressure on the families can come from being blamed for the death. Karojisatsu, suicide due to the overtime working depression, can be recognized as death caused by overworking as well, however, it is hard to compensate the cases that the employees are the ones who kill themselves. Such things make it even harder for the bereaved families to get compensation.

Rather than compensate after workers’ death, government and companies should put more effort into stopping overtime working. This is where the “Work-Life Balance” policy comes in. This policy originates from American enterprises, its main purpose being to respect personal characteristic diversity, and take into account both healthy working and living standards. For employees, striking the balance between life and work will maintain both their physical and mental health. It will also benefit the employers as it helps raise the reputation of companies. Having higher quality employees raises the sales and productivity, which is a win-win relationship. Not only can the “Work-Life Balance” policy prevent workers from karoshi and karojisatsu, it can also benefit societal development in long run. It can change the concept of the “working man and housewife”, which is the traditional stereotype in Japanese society meaning the man should work to earn money while the wife should stay home and do the housework. Therefore, not only can more women be part of the work cycle, but it can also create a better environment to raise a child and improve the declining birthrate problem. The concrete stratagems of work-life balance included: short-time work, flexible working time, working at home, job sharing, job suspended for children care purpose……etc. In Japan, it is very difficult to introduce new stratagems into the current system. The most used stratagem now is short-time working for children-care purpose, in which 72% of Japanese companies use.

Overall, the overworking problem is affecting more and more employees and companies in Japan. Since the number of foreign workers has been increasing, along with the use of social media, it is easy for overworking to become a worldwide known issue, in fact, there are already cases of foreign employees dying from overworking themselves. Not only does this effect employees’ health, but it also hurts economic development. Overworking is a serious problem that needs government intervention and people to take action against it in order to improve everyday life, therefore, improving society as a whole.
