Japanese working to death

2005-08-25 10:22

Tokyo - After one month of training in a field he knew little about, Sunao Kawada was put into a high-pressure team designing a computer. After four months, he had trouble sleeping and was diagnosed with depression.

Two months after that, the 24-year-old worker threw himself to his death from the 10th floor of a building.

"In hindsight, my son was a victim of corporate restructuring," said Kiyoko Kawada, his mother.

Japan's economy is moving toward a sound recovery following a decade of stagnation after companies succeeded in trimming their costs.

But the human costs have continued to rise - longer hours, greater stress and more people literally working themselves to death.

Pressure from companies

A record 524 people or their families applied in the fiscal year to March 2005 for compensation over mental disorders due to excessive work, according to the ministry of health, labour and welfare.

Of the applications, which include 121 for people who killed themselves, the ministry granted compensation to just 130.

After her son died, Kawada filed a lawsuit against the company, which remains pending.

The Japanese government has campaigned for years to stop death from overwork, a phenomenon that grew so common during Japan's post-World War 2 economic miracle that it has its own word, "karoshi".

Long working hours

However, Japan's annual working hours per person continues to top the developed world with 1 975 hours in 2003 in manufacturing jobs, above the United States at 1 929 and Britain at 1 888. The gap is wider compared with the 1 539 hours worked each year in France and 1 525 hours in Germany.

The average number of hours by regular employees - excluding part-time workers - increased to 168.4 per month in 2004 from 166.0 in 2001, according to a labour ministry survey.

Officially, the number of hours worked per person is on the decline in Japan. But this is because of a surge in part-time or contract jobs, which now account for a third of the workforce as Japan moves from a model of lifetime employment to less secure and often more stressful livelihoods.

Difficult to monitor overtime

Takashi Sumioka, a psychiatrist who specialises in work disorders, said his patients had shifted in the past few years from men in their 40s and 50s traumatised by unemployment and job relocation to men in their 30s putting in their all at their prime working age.

"Their working hours are seemingly getting longer and the mental strains they feel appear to be more severe than before," the doctor said.

Chikanobu Okamura, a lawyer who has long fought to put an end to karoshi, said people's long, unrecognised hours were far from unusual in Japan.

"It's still very difficult to make courts acknowledge the hidden or unregistered overtime that companies force employees to work," Okamura said.

"And on top of that, the laws are insufficient to save all of the people who are suffering from excess work."

- AFP