A 31-year-old woman, Miwa Sado was a journalist for Japan’s state-run broadcaster. Sado was tasked with covering multiple local elections in Japan.

She is said to have worked 159 hours of overtime and was known was working over the weekends as well. Sado is said to have been working late hours on a daily basis and her parents noticed that it was taking a toll in their daughter. She sent an email to her parents on June 26th.

A congestive heart failure caused her death just a few days after the second elections which were almost a month to the day when she sent an email to her parents.

NHK, broke the news only this week. This is becoming a serious issue in Japan and it has even been termed as karoshi, or “death from overwork”.

Karoshi became a phenomenon in the 1980s, as reports of blue-collar employees getting mentally and physically exhausted from work and killing themselves or dying from diseases related to work stress. Nowadays, it seems to have affected even white-collar executives and engineers too.

A 2016 government report on Karoshi says that out of the companies surveyed nearly 25 per cent of them had few employees who were working almost 80 hours of overtime in a month. The president of Dentsu stepped down from his position after Matsuri Takahashi, an employee of the firm committed suicide.

A government investigation into Sado’s death shows that she died due to her hectic work life. The report said that she could not get the rest she needed because of her work life. She is said to have been fatigued and deprived of sleep when she died.
 

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