In Japan, people think of hard-working as a virtue. However, this results in longer and longer working hours which causes a very serious overworking problem. These added work hours cause sleep deprivation and stress on the individual and their family. In worst cases it can lead to death in Japan. This issue is too big to be ignored, enough so that special terms were created 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 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. It is clear that this is an issue that has been around for a while, but not focused on. This issue needs to be taken seriously in efforts to stop the suffering it causes. 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, we would be able to understand more about the history of the overworking problem and its impact on Japanese society. Overworking problem need to be stopped as we can work to implement the “Work-Life balance” policies, policies or stratagems that can be used to help workers maintain a heathy work-life and home-life, to reduce and stop karoshi and karojisatsu. 

The history of how overworking culture started in Japan can be tracked back to the era by the end of World War II. 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. They mistook this price bubble as another economic miracle, causing people to work even harder. This allowed for the karoshi phenomenon to be more noticed by Japanese people, enough so that Japan’s government started to compile statistics of those deaths which were caused by overworking in 1987. 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. However, blaming laziness as one of the reason for economic depression and also hoping for another economic miracle, 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 systems will bind workers to their jobs, making them feel a great sense of responsibility and pressure to complete all their tasks accurately and quickly. 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 can 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 economic miracle, they thought it was reasonable and acceptable to sacrifice health to earn a higher payment. They considered it an achievement to work longer and be more productive than others, and also provide more for their families. That is why the employees were willing to work such a long time. However, after the economic bubble collapsed, Japan entering the low growth period and Japanese workers started changing their thoughts and reconsidering if it was worth it to work for such a long time, people started to take actions and protest against the long working hour little by little.

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 country most known for overtime working rather than America and Italy. If t  his 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 growth in economy, both employees and employers thought that more working time was better. 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, worsening workers’ mental and physical health and causing karoshi and karojisatsu to be viewed even more seriously after 2000. Work-related deaths were appearing more and more times, enough so that the public had to take notice of the issue.

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, they want employees to work longer hours in order to increase productivity to help increase sales, even though it might result in a lower evaluation of a company. But how does overworking lower a companies’ evaluation? Because in modern society, social media such as twitter, Facebook, and blogs are very common. It is easy for employees to post or tweet any information about their working environment on the internet for the public to see. 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.

Overworking will also affect 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, which is also a main reason why Japan has such low birth rates compared to other countries. Parents are working too much to be able to properly care for a child, and not enough company benefits are provided. In the long term, low birth rates will result in a shortage in labor market and cause employees to need to work even more to support their families, which creates vicious cycle. 

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 high developed countries, we can easily tell that Japan has a low economic growth rate compared to others. Longer working time not only doesn’t offer a better economic result but also decreases the creativity and productivity. However, overworking culture in Japan has existed for decades and it’s hard to change this phenomenon overnight. It is a cultural and societal norm.

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.
