A Japanese woman who logged 159 hours of overtime in the month before her death died from overwork, Japanese labor inspectors declared Thursday.
Miwa Sado was a Tokyo broadcaster with NHK who died in 2013, three days after covering the national upper house elections in July 2013. She had only two days off in the month before she died, The Guardian reported.
Sado’s death is one of thousands each year attributed to overwork, or “karoshi,” as it is called in Japan. The head of the broadcasting company resigned after her death, and the government is now proposing to cap monthly overtime at 100 hours and impose penalties for companies whose employees exceed that limit.
In a 2016 whitepaper on karoshi, the government admitted one in five employees in Japan were at risk of dying due to overwork.
Some victims of karoshi kill themselves, while others have heart attacks, strokes, or other conditions caused by overwork in Japan’s hard-driving culture, where employees are routinely expected to do whatever it takes to get the job done.
Critics say even the proposed government limits don’t go far enough and that more attention to work-life balance is needed.
NHK waited until now to make Sado’s cause of death public out of respect to her family, The Guardian reported. Her parents issued a statement through the broadcaster which said, “Even today, four years on, we cannot accept our daughter’s death as a reality. We hope that the sorrow of a bereaved family will not be wasted.”
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