Employee Dies In Japan Due To Heavy Overtime

An employee of NHK public broadcaster, Miwa Sado, died of heart failure after logging 159 hours of overtime in one month.

The 31-year-old died in July 2013 when she took just 2 days of leave, but her case was made public this week by her former employer.

A large number of deaths in Japan is attributed to the long hours work and death of Sado is surely to increase pressure on Japanese authorities to address the issue and to promote a debate over work-life balance.

In April 2015 a 24-year-old worker Matsuri Takahashi killed herself and Labor standards officials cites the cause to be stress brought on by long working hours. She had been working over 100 hours overtime in months before her death.

About a week before killing herself she wrote, “I want to die… I’m physically and mentally shattered.”

National debate was triggered immediately after her death about the country’s work practices.

A research reveals the employees in Japan work longer hours than employees in United States and Britain.

Sado was a political reporter and she was covering the Tokyo metropolitan assembly elections and national upper house elections then.

Three day after the upper house elections she died.

Sado’s parents 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.”