363 The Truth About Death by Overwork in Japan

So many sad cases of people dying here in Japan from what is called karoshi and the media constantly talks about death through overwork.  This is nonsense and the media are doing us all a disservice.  This is fake news.  The cases of physical work killing you are almost exclusively limited to situations where physical strain has induced a cardiac arrest or a cerebral incident resulting in a stroke.  In Japan, that cause of death from overwork rarely happens. The vast majority of cases of karoshi death are related to suicide by the employee.  This is a reaction to mental and physical exhaustion and the associated stress that piles up, until it totally overwhelming.  So the real source of death from karaoshi is stress, not physically working too hard.  Just where is that stress coming from?

It is coming from two sources:  the individual’s inability to deal with the stress of long hours, long commutes, and no time for recovery, driving them to depression and ending their own precious lives.  The other source is management incompetence, to allow that amount of stress to be experienced by their staff in the first place.  It is compounded by power harassment of those who struggle to keep up with the output requirements.

In my view, management irresponsibility is the prime killer.  If there were no cases of exceptional stress buildup, then the staff wouldn’t need remedial actions at all.  The long hours worked, long hours of public transport commutation and high amounts of pressure from bosses are the real problems.  The hundreds of extra hours of overtime worked are being logged for no justifiable reason. 

In many previous cases, such as Dentsu, the company tried to hide the extent of the hours being worked.   Management was party to the process, all the while knowing it was wrong.  They were also aware of previous cases where people cracked under the strain of too little sleep and permanent tiredness and took their own life.  They knew this was a possibility, but did nothing to alter the work flows.

This is criminal and that is what the courts found.  Dentsu was fined 500,000 yen by the judicial system.  However, was justice served?  The young woman involved was 24 years old when she jumped off the roof of the Dentsu dormitory, to kill herself and end her stress and depression.  Many would consider a fine of 500,000 yen insignificant.

The management didn’t control the work flow.  If there was so much work on, why didn’t they bring in either more full time staff or part-time or contract workers to help?  This is what bosses are paid to do – get through the work and apply the required resources to do that.  The system didn’t see it that way.  Presumably, they expected the staff to put in the ridiculous hours to save the company the money needed for salaries for new or additional staff.

 We can talk about there being a culture of long hours in Japan and it is true.  Dentsu was picked out in the 1970s by Time Magazine as a company of fearless samurai salarymen, toiling ridiculous hours for their bosses, so this is not a new development.  They were held up as a model to contrast with their flabby Western counterparts. These long hours weren’t needed then and are not needed now.

It is being driven by a pathetic white collar culture of low productivity.  The work expands to fit the time in Japan as per Parkinson’s Law and so working hours elongate to suit.  If bosses were capable, they would be seeking improvements in productivity to get through the work in less time.  Is Japan not capable of being highly productive? 

The kaizen and kamban production systems in manufacturing are well known in the West as methods of achieving maximum efficiency by blue collar workers.  The irony is that one hundred meters away, staff in corporate offices are working at super low levels of efficiency for the same company – the contrast is large.  How can the same senior managers entertain these two contradictory ideas in their minds, at the same time? 

No problem for them because they have compartmentalised the situations.  “This is how we do it around here and so we will keep it going just as it is.  The factory system is different to an office, so there is no relevancy”.  That is simply lazy thinking.  Efficiency in process, in workload distribution, in systems sequencing, in checking methods, in approvals are all areas that can be applied to office work as well.

What is being kept alive by mediocre company leaders in the way of standard Japanese corporate practices?  Here is a list of leadership crimes for which no one is ever reprimanded.  No clear daily prioritised individual goals, poor time management, meetings too numerous and too long.  Painfully slow decision-making required to get everyone on board.  Disengaged staff turning up to get paid and not motivated to be bothered to innovate.  Poor communication, no real coaching, demotivating performance evaluations, mistaken mistake handling methods and zero effectiveness delegation skills on the part of undereducated leaders, promoted on the basis of longevity and age hierarchy, rather than their ability.

There are no excuses for this legacy system to continue in the 21st century and we have to change it from the inside out.  Government estimates are that roughly 20% of the working population is suffering from depression.  It is time to change things in Japan.  We should see no more cases of karoshi here – there are simply no justifications for continued company mismanagement of their staff.  We need to better educate the leaders on how to lead, to teach the managers how to manage and to encourage the staff to push back on illegal requests from senior management to work crazy hours.