The Diet, Japan's parliament, passed a law on Friday requiring the government to take measures to prevent deaths from overwork. The bill, which was submitted by a cross-party group of lawmakers, was approved at today's plenary meeting of the House of Councilors, the upper house. It has already been passed by the House of Representatives, the lower house. The law stipulates the government's responsibility to achieve a society free of deaths and suicides due to overwork by showing the public the true depth of the problem and taking action accordingly. Has Japan achieved its industrial success at the expense of the health of its workers? Is such poor health “contagious”? Richard Wokutch, a professor of management at Virginia Tech, reports that "karoshi," or "death from overwork," is one of the most controversial health problems in Japan. And there is some evidence that Japanese companies may be exporting stressful working conditions to their overseas operations. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get an original essay Many Japanese will be willing to work unpaid overtime to an extreme extent, especially since their younger colleagues will often quit when 'a job is too hard. In some cases, there has been evidence that companies were aware of an employee's poor health. Meanwhile, lawsuits over overwork deaths have increased in Japan, with relatives of the deceased demanding compensation. However, before compensation can be awarded, the labor inspectorate must recognize that the death is work-related. As this can take many years during detailed and lengthy court hearings, many do not require payment. Karōshi Karōshi (過労死), which can be literally translated from Japanese as "death by overwork", is sudden occupational death. Although this category is important, Japan is one of the few countries to report it in its statistics as a separate category. The main medical causes of death from karōshi are heart attacks and strokes due to stress. The first case of karōshi was reported in 1969 with the stroke death of a 29-year-old worker in the shipping department of Japan's largest newspaper company. However, it was not until the late 1980s, during the bubble economy, when several high-ranking business executives, still in the prime of their lives, died suddenly without any signs of illness, that the media began to pick up what seemed to be the case. be a new phenomenon. This new phenomenon was quickly labeled karōshi and was immediately perceived as a new and serious threat to workers. In 1987, amid growing public concern, the Japanese Ministry of Labor began publishing statistics on karōshi. Japan's rise, after the devastation of World War II, to an important economic position in the postwar decades has been seen as the trigger for what is known as a new epidemic. It has been recognized that employees cannot work twelve or more hours a day, six or seven days a week, year after year, without suffering physically and mentally. A recent measurement found that a Japanese worker works about two hours of overtime per day. average. It is common for overtime to not be paid. The ILO published an article on “karoshi”, which means death by overwork. In the article he mentions four typical cases.