Catherwood LibraryILR School

As Japan aggressively invests in infrastructure to prepare to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, yet another case of “karoshi,” or death-by-overwork, has met the public eye and intensified the urgency for serious reform to Japan’s work-life culture. A young 23-year-old man working for Sanshin Corporation (a subcontractor for Taisei Corporation) on a new Tokyo stadium took his own life after logging nearly 200 hours of overtime the previous month. Ichiro Sekiwa, a Sanshin executive, stated that at the time that this worker was logging so many hours, the project may have been vastly understaffed for the amount of work necessary. This instance is one of countless overwork-related deaths that have taken place in Japan over the years as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and other Japanese legislators have attempted to address this serious cultural dilemma, but have fallen short of effectively changing social norms and conceptions about overwork. Evidently, these pressures to overwork are serious labor violations but, because these pressures come from a complex social source, laws often fail to address the underlying problem.