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THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY ONLINE, WHICH WAS UPDATED IN JANUARY 2002, added the Japanese term "karoshi," meaning "death brought on by overwork or job-related exhaustion."
DEATH FROM OVERWORK IS AS OLD AS THE history of capitalism. In Capital, Marx cited a June 1863 London newspaper report entitled "Death from Simple Overwork," in which a 20-year-old female garment worker died after working days that averaged 16.5 hours, with some in the busy season reaching 30 hours. Syokko Jijyo (Conditions of Shopworkers), published in 1903 by Japan's Agriculture and Commerce Department, contained accounts of textile factory girls who worked through the night, putting in 24- or even 36-hour shifts, resulting in fatal diseases.
But these phenomena of the past and karoshi in the present day are not one and the same. We've grown accustomed to thinking of the "dark satanic mills" and the Dickensian working conditions of early industrialism. But karoshi is a social problem happening in the modern age when presumably the human rights of each person are respected in principle and almost all working people can live a long life. Karoshi is work-related death that takes the form of cerebral and cardiovascular disorders brought on by overwork in highly developed capitalist society.
Karoshi is a sociomedical term. The discoverers of karoshi were specialists in occupational medicine and cardiovascular diseases. The first case of karoshi in fact was reported by Migiwa Hosokawa in 1969. The term itself was coined by Tetsunojo Uehata in 1978. In 1982, the book entitled Karoshi, by Tajiri Seiichiro, Hosokawa, and Uehata, announced the phenomenon to the public.1
However, it wasn't until the end of 1980s that karoshi became a major social problem in Japan. According to the Labor Force Survey, the number of those who worked an average of 60 or more hours per week hit the record level of 7.77 million (almost one-fourth of male employees) in 1988. That was 2.4 times the number for 1975. In the same year, 1988, a volunteer group of lawyers and doctors set up nationwide "karoshi hotlines" to provide free legal assistance about karoshi-related compensation and prevention. Immediately after that, the National Defense Counsel for Victims of Karoshi (NDCVK) was formed by lawyers who do pro bono work for the anti-karoshi movement.2
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