"Japan has no legal limits on working hours, but the labor ministry recognizes two types of karoshi: death from cardiovascular illness linked to overwork, and suicide following work-related mental stress.
A cardiovascular death is likely to be considered karoshi if an employee worked 100 hours of overtime in the month beforehand, or 80 hours of overtime in two or more consecutive months in the previous six.
A suicide could qualify if it follows an individual's working 160 hours or more of overtime in one month or more than 100 hours of overtime for three consecutive months.
Work-related suicides are up 45 percent in the past four years among those 29 and younger, and up 39 percent among women, labor ministry data show."
13 comments:
100 hours of overtime would be essentially 6 days a week for 10 hours a day. Driven entrepreneurs do it often, but to do it consistently for someone else or a corporation you don't have ownership in is just brutal. They badly need more independence and individuality in their culture. This work ethic is not exactly helping their decades long stagnant economy. Hard work is important, and I think it's vital to happiness, but creativity, enthusiasm, and innovation is much more powerful for productivity. The problem for Japan is all those Japanese they have there.
For some people giving orders is a form of relaxation. Taking orders for one hundred hours a week is different than giving orders one hundred hours a week. I think the mortality rate among overworked executives is far less than among that of their subordinates.
Either Japan's completely schizoid or the stories in our press about the rise of the Japanese Herbivore Man are overstated. Because you'd think a herbivore man would be hardly motivated at all to work himself to death. What for if he's dropped out of the mating status game?
A lot of japanese men or as I call them, man-babies, are being overlooked for marriage for various reasons. Karoshi is one of them and japanese women are fairly disgusted with the state of many japanese men. Why would they marry any of these guys who basically would rather fetishize and idolize westerners if they can get them above their own kind. All Karoshi does is prove that Japan's population policies didn't work or rather they worked so well, that they've left their working salarymen to die working.
Also, I'll never work for a japanese company again. Ever.
The Japanese are such an unusual culture. Saving face, work ethic, decline in birth rate, and now Fukushima.
I've read there are radioactive wild boars on the loose now. I haven't checked lately, is radioactivity still spilling into the ocean?
Deb, oh yeah, there is still radioactivity still happening. They have had to full uncontrolled meltdowns of reactors 2 and 3 at Fukushima. The Japs are unusual because they are one of the most homogeneous cultures and people on the planet. I think Icelanders are probably more homogeneous than the Japs. But their culture got weird, right after they lost their pacific campaign and then the US injected itself into their society to some degree. Their markets, their clothing, their shows, their sexual habits, etc. all bizarre. It's as if they have deliberately done it this way to break up their cultural monotony.
I don't think Fukushima was ever fully contained yet.
Go nuclear!
You can't die of underwork.
See: Obama.
Living off the work of others adds about 10 years.
That's why rats are so successful.
Lost in Translation was an interesting movie.
I never said they were losers, just that their society is quite different. I've been to Japan many times for business and leisure. However, they are quite staunch in their general treatment of gaijin.
Not only are the radio active boars on the loose, they're "breeding like rabbits".
Just when I'm in the midst of wondering why googling for Fukushima news isn't something one does rather than asking blog commenters for info, my fingers start typing and I find news I wouldn't have gone looking for if someone hadn't asked.
With the latest being a report from Fukushimaupdate.com about radiation being so high TEPCO's robots can't survive.
March 14, 2016 / Radiation in Fukushima was so bad, they couldn’t afford to send people into some places. It turns out, the radiation was so high that even the chrome-domed replacements didn’t fare much better.
“It is extremely difficult to access the inside of the nuclear plant,” Naohiro Masuda, TEPCO’s head of decommissioning said. “The biggest obstacle is the radiation.”
The solution? Robots. The problem? Robots.
“It takes two years to develop a single-function robot,” Masuda said.
As soon as TEPCO’s robots, co-designed with Toshiba, get close to Reactor 3, their circuitry gets destroyed by the radiation. The robots are designed to “swim” in the radiated pools where the radioactive fuel rods are located, to search for and recover them.
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