For the second time in a year, a court in Japan has found that an employee of Toyota has been killed by “karoshi,” a relatively new term to the Japanese lexicon which means “death by overwork.”
The most-recent court finding, which enables the surviving family members to receive compensation from the government, concerned the death of a 45-year old lead engineer for the Toyota Camry hybrid.
This employee, who worked in Toyota City, the company’s huge headquarters near Nagoya, a few hundred miles south of Tokyo, had worked more than 80 overtime hours in at least each of the two months before he collapsed at his home, where he was determined to have died from ischemic heart disease, now clarified by a court as being a result of karoshi.
The man was found dead at home by his daughter, and was scheduled to leave Japan the next day for the US. The project on which he was working was to be exhibited at the 2006 North American International Auto Show, known popularly as the Detroit Auto Show.
In 2007, another widow was ruled by a court to be eligible for the same kind of government benefits, as her
30-year old husband collapsed and died at work. In that case, a Toyota employee died of overwork after logging more than 106 hours of overtime in a month, a judge ruled in November, 2007, reversing a government ministry’s earlier decision not to pay compensation to his widow. The employee, who was working at a Toyota factory in central Japan, died of an “irregular heart beat” in February 2002 after passing out in the factory around 4am. In Japan, it should be noted, the average worker uses less than 50 percent of paid holidays, according to government data.
The Japanese Ministry of Health made news around the world in 1987, when they adopted and clarified the concept of karoshi as law; Japan is thought to be the only industrialized country which accepts death by overwork as a legal cause of death and can implicate both the company involved and the government in paying benefits to the person’s survivors.
But before any of us in America start to “tsk, tsk” those hard-working Japanese, try the following on for size, from a United Nations 2007 report: “US workers put in the longest hours on the job in industrialized nations, clocking up nearly 2,000 hours per capita in 1997, the equivalent of almost two working weeks more than their counterparts in Japan, where annual hours worked have been gradually declining since 1980, according to a statistical study of global labor trends. Americans also work the longest hours among industrialized countries, Japanese second longest. Europeans work less time, but register faster productivity gains.”
Japanese society is so different from the United States that it might as well be Mars. European countries with a long, recorded past have some social similarities to Japan, but when it comes to the concept of teamwork, the Japanese make a championship NBA professional basketball team look like a bunch of guys who just happened to show-up at the gym at about the same time.
Click below to read more about karoshi and one man's experiences with Japanese culture over the past 30 years.
A homogeneous society with traditions which go back over 1,000 years (similar to the pre-WWII UK), Japanese have always lived in close, crowded quarters because barely 5% of the country’s land is arable, much less convenient for the development of big cities. Practically every square foot of the country that’s flat has cities or crops on it, and mountainous areas were terraced for growing rice, tea and many other crops, in some cases centuries ago. (Nissan's GT-R sports car on the assembly line at the Tochigi plant, the only factory building the near-$80,000 supercar).
Because of these age-old tight quarters, Japanese long ago found that the best way to coexist is to consider themselves as members of one, big happy family. Of course, in some cases, especially in feudal Japan, simply killing all the members of that “other” family was an easier way to accomplish this “getting along” business, but that strategy doesn’t fly these days.
The guy from Hokkaido treats the woman from far-away Okinawa with the same respect and deference he 
treats the members of his own family, and wouldn’t consider doing otherwise. All elderly people are treated with great respect; orders from a boss or someone of higher social standing are followed without question. When meeting others for the first time, especially in a business situation, both parties first bow equally (except if one is clearly older, then the younger one bows more deeply) and they then exchange business cards. When it becomes obvious, based on those ubiquitous cards, who the person of higher ranking is, they bow again, the lesser of the two bowing more deeply. I’ve considered having some cards made-up which identify me as “American Emperor,” but was advised against it by some Japanese friends. (Soft-core porn manga comics are a favorite pursuit on the Japanese trains; so many women have complained of being groped by men on the train that in large cities, "female-only" cars have been put into operation during rush hours and have been a stunning success).
And these guys can pull out a business card on a moment’s notice; I don’t know how they do it, or where they keep the damn things, but they’re faster with a business card than any quick-drawing, pistol-packing cowboy.
With courts finding cases of karoshi becoming more common, another aspect of Japanese society is brought to the fore, that of the treatment of women.
Many women are married by 22 or so, and until then, they may have finished college and even started working for a corporation, but never in important positions of trust or authority. There are fewer than 50 female corporate CEOs in Japan. With the vast majority of women married and having children well before their 30s, business advancement simply doesn’t exist.
The visitor to Japan will notice more women working in government jobs than in the private sector, such as police officers (few police carry guns, similar again to the UK) or as employees of one of the gigantic train companies in Japan, helping travelers with schedules or buying tickets.
In all the many times we’ve been there, we’ve never seen a female in a position which puts them in authority above a man. In the private sector, such as company offices, women traditionally “make copies and serve refreshments,” it’s said. They also greet visitors and generally try to be helpful in any way they can. (Robots work on this assembly line; Honda's then-president told me in 1997 that their company was building the Asimo robot, "Because young Japanese people don't want to do such tough jobs, so we have to build the new assembly line workers," and trust me, he was not joking. Asimo robots now operate in virtual networks at some Honda facilities, serving food to employees in dining areas and when their batteries get low, they plug themselves into charging stations, without human help, and also step out of the way when a human is walking towards them).
This is one more similarity I’ve found between the UK and Japan; that men appear to treat women somewhat coldly, perhaps, to an American’s eyes, even harshly, rebuking and criticizing quite often and publicly, even in front of guests and visitors. I’m certain many American women reading this will think, “Well, he should look at American men from an American woman’s perspective!” All I can say to that is, you probably have a point, but go to Japan and the UK, then let me know what you think.
For the modern American man, a trip to Japan is almost like entering a social time machine with the way-back dial set to about 1935. It’s a great place to be a man, if you’re a man who doesn’t mind seeing more than half the population treated badly on a daily basis.
Women, though, do run the households. Their “salaryman” husbands dutifully turn-in their paychecks every two weeks and the wife pays the bills, takes care of the household accounts and gives her husband and children an allowance.
For women such as those involved in these karoshi cases, to bring their complaints to the court of public
opinion, shows incredible courage. I can’t imagine the pressure on these widows, from their families and friends alike, to be quiet, to just “take one for the team” and to just say “shikatanai,” which means, “It can’t be helped,” kind of the Japanese version of “You can’t fight city hall, what are ya gonna do?” (Some seats on trains are reserved for the elderly or the physically challenged; reading on the train or texting friends are hobbies for all ages).
Americans say, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” where the Japanese say, “The nail which sticks out gets hit the hardest.” And they mean it, too. Being an "outsider" in Japan can mean a difficult life, but the ones who fight to succeed sometimes do so in astounding ways, such as Sony founder Akio Morita and Soichiro Honda and his cars and motorcycles, both considered "radicals" in Japan for their ability to think outside all possible boxes and their very unusual, for Japan, tenacity.
On a Shinkansen train one day (which Westerners call the Bullet Train, but the word really means “New Trunk Line,” referring to the system of tracks which serve only the Shinkansen trains; when an earthquake hits anywhere in the country, all Shinkansen nationwide automatically shut down until it's found if there's been any damage to those tracks) my Japanese seatmate struck up a conversation with me, which happens often to Westerners in Japan as the locals like to practice their foreign language skills with visitors. How many Americans could start practicing their Japanese when sitting on a train next to a visitor from that country? In Japan, it’s difficult to find a native who doesn’t speak at least basic, passable, understandable and useful English.
In talking, I found out my new friend was a psychiatrist. He told me there were very, very few psychiatrists and psychologists in his country, and he had to go to the US for his graduate and medical education. He explained that in a society where people are raised from childhood to internalize all feelings, especially the negative ones, it’s not easy to get people to tell a doctor, or anyone, how they “feel” about something, or anything. In Japan, those things are not only not anyone else’s business, it’s rude to even broach the subject and antithetical to the smooth running of their society.
“If we all started telling everyone what we really think, deep inside,” a visitor gets the impression from many Japanese, “how would we be able to keep making great products the world wants, and then how would our country survive?”
We talked about what I saw as a huge drinking problem among his countrymen, and he said, “In Japan, almost everyone seems to be an alcoholic, so they don’t think there’s any problem at all.” It’s like the old joke about confronting someone about their “problem drinking” and their reply is, “The only time there’s a problem is when I’m not drinking.”
When I asked him why he was even bothering to try and establish a psychiatric practice in a country where, frankly, people of his profession are probably not very popular, he said, so loudly that others turned to look, “Because I must save my country!”
I might have thought he was crazy himself, but his enthusiasm for his life’s “mission” was also typically Japanese.
Beer, sake, wine and hard liquor are all available in vending machines throughout Japan. Whether you’re
walking on a busy Osaka street, standing on a train platform way out in the countryside at Fuji-no-Miya or in a hotel lobby, a good stiff drink is only a few hundred Yen and the ability to operate a vending machine away for anyone, of any age. (Nissan GT-R body shells move along their assembly line, and, below, their twin-turbocharged 3.8 liter V6 engines which produce 480-horsepower are built in "clean rooms" in the Tochigi factory).
Apart from trying to handle the usual tensions of work and family, Japanese workers are also expected to show what Americans would consider an almost “undying loyalty” to their companies. Lifetime employment is still the norm in the country, and people believe that if they take care of their jobs in a sincere and professional manner and do their best to protect their company through their own never-ending quest to root-out problems and, along with the other team members, develop fixes for them, then their company will prosper and take care of them and their families. And this is still fact to most Japanese workers and their employers, not merely some goal which will never be reached.
I was told by a Japanese friend of a printing company in Japan, a small, private, family-owned firm, had developed a 500-year plan for the company. This is not uncommon, based somewhat on Buddhist principles of cause and effect, and that no effort made for the prosperity of a company is ever wasted; somehow, the reward for that effort will appear, from one client or another, one customer or another.
It is not unusual in midsize to large Japanese cities, to see, late at night, a large number of people walking in small groups, obviously quite drunk, leaning on each other as they make their way to another bar or the bus or train and the journey home. What surprises visitors is that these scenes play out not on weekend nights, as is common in most countries, especially the US, but in Japan you see this activity six nights a week and even Sunday nights people are out and seem to be enjoying themselves.
An important part of company loyalty in Japan has to do with the relationship between workers and their immediate bosses, their “section chiefs” or “group chiefs”. Work in Japan’s offices starts officially at 7, 8 or 9am, but in reality, because of the effects of partying the night before, real work doesn’t get underway in many offices until late morning. And because of this, workers are expected to stay at their jobs until after the official closing time in an attempt to finish a full day on the job.
But though all the work may be done, the job for the salaryman is not over. He is expected to stay at work until his boss is ready to leave, and even then, he doesn’t go home, but goes out for an evening of drinking with his fellow workers and the boss. The explanation for this, if anyone asks, is that because work is so hard on everyone, it’s only natural everyone would want to spend a few hours together “letting their hair down” and relaxing with each other away from the office, where people can “relax.” This practice is not only well-accepted, it is encouraged throughout society.
So they end the evening around midnight, and those are the groups a visitor sees on the streets, trying to
find their way home after another night of forced carousing. Often these guys practice their singing (and karaoke is as popular as ever), and “Moon River” seems a popular, timeless choice.
Usually these groups are made up of all men, though occasionally a female is seen with a group, but not often. And there are no groups of drunken, carousing Japanese women heading for the trains late at night, either. In fact, more than once I’ve witnessed a group of obviously drunk men literally running, chasing after women on the street, yelling and cajoling, these women literally running scared and no one offering help.
Generally most women are at home, putting the kids to bed after helping with their homework (the kids don’t get home until 7 or 8pm because they go to tutoring school after their six-day a week school day is over, around 5pm).
And the whole cycle starts-up again the next morning.
So, we have karoshi, death by overwork, legally recognized in Japan as a kind of allowable manslaughter, paid for with blood money from the Japanese government and their corporate world.
Comments