Okay, this article gave me serious pause: “Young Worker Clocked 159 Hours of Overtime in a Month. Then She Died.”
Per the article in the NYT:
Miwa Sado, a young journalist for Japan’s state-run broadcaster, spent the summer of 2013 frantically covering two local elections in Tokyo.
Over the course of a month, she clocked 159 hours of overtime. She rarely took weekends off. She worked until midnight nearly every night. On her birthday, June 26, she emailed her parents, who thought she sounded weak.
Not quite a month later, just days after the second election, she died of congestive heart failure. She was 31.
The case — the latest high-profile example of karoshi, or “death from overwork” — came to light only after the broadcaster, NHK, announced it this week.
I don’t know what’s worse, that a human being died of working too much, or that the Japanese actually have a word for this atrocity. (Koreans have their own word for this, kwarosa (과로사), as do the Chinese, guolaosi (过劳死)).
Perhaps I will take that break this afternoon that I seem to keep pushing off because there’s too much to do and not enough hours to finish it all.
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Richard H. Harris 