Japan's War on Overwork

A young woman in her 20s works 18 to 20 hours a day, including weekends, until she suffers a mental breakdown. A man in his 50s toils similar hours, averaging only three hours of sleep a night, until he collapses from a brain hemorrhage. Such are stories of corporate work culture in Japan, where employees are expected to log in an incredible number of overtime hours—often without pay. There’s even a legally recognized term for death-by-overwork: karoshi. The number of compensation claims filed by families of karoshi victims reached an all-time high last year.

Last week, Tokyo’s governor (the rough equivalent of an American mayor and state governor combined in terms of duties), Yuriko Koike, announced a plan to decrease overtime hours for the city’s 170,000 municipal workers, ordering them to leave the office by 8 p.m. at the latest. “Overtime prevention teams” will perform “overtime reduction marathons” in each department—they’ll turn out the lights to signal that it’s time to call it a day. Koike says she hopes that this system will become a model for other Japanese cities and for the private sector.