All work, no leisure makes Japanese more suicide prone

Overwork, a deep-rooted problem in Japan, is back in the spotlight.

A 23-year-old worker on Tokyo's new National Stadium, the centerpiece of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, committed suicide in April. On July 20 his parents submitted an application for compensation to Japan's Labor Standards Office, saying the cause of his suicide was overwork - he worked 200 hours of overtime in the month before his death, twice as much as the "allowable" maximum 100 hours of overtime a month.

Death by overwork, which first hit the headlines in Japan in the 1970s, has a Japanese term: karoshi. Excessive overtime work is still the norm in Japanese companies. A government white paper released in October last year showed that almost a quarter of the companies employed people who worked more than 80 hours of overtime a month - the official threshold for the risk of karoshi.