After one month of training in a field he knew little about, Sunao Kawada was put into a high-pressure team designing a computer. After four months, he had trouble sleeping and was diagnosed with depression.
Two months after that, the 24-year-old worker threw himself to his death from the 10th floor of a building.
"In hindsight, my son was a victim of corporate restructuring," said Kiyoko Kawada, his mother.
Japan's economy is moving toward a sound recovery following a decade of stagnation after companies succeeded in trimming their costs.
But the human costs have continued to rise -- longer hours, greater stress and more people literally working themselves to death.
A record 524 people or their families applied in the fiscal year to March 2005 for compensation over mental disorders due to excessive work, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.
Of the applications, which include 121 for people who killed themselves, the ministry granted compensation to just 130.
Before he died, Kawada had applied for compensation and been rejected.
A mathematics major in university, Kawada entered a computer programming company in April 1996 and was ordered to join an elite team constructing a computer system to be used for Japan's central bank.
"The company had shortened the period of training to one month from three months in preceding years. And his supervisor had no time to help junior colleagues as he himself was overwhelmed by loads of work which had increased as a result of corporate restructuring," said his mother, 58.
Kawada said her son was diagnosed with depression four months after he started to work and that his physical and mental condition seriously deteriorated but the company forced him to press on.
After her son died, Kawada filed a lawsuit against the company, which remains pending. She also complained to a government labor standards office, which denied his suicide was linked to the job.
"After I filed the lawsuit, the company set up medical services to combat mental health problems. Then why don't they apologize to me?" she said furiously.
The Japanese government has campaigned for years to stop death from overwork, a phenomenon that grew so common during Japan's post-World War II economic miracle that it has its own word, karoshi.
However, Japan's annual working hours per person continue to top the developed world with 1,975 hours in 2003 in manufacturing jobs, above the United States at 1,929 and Britain at 1,888. The gap is wider compared with the 1,539 hours worked each year in France and 1,525 hours in Germany.
And the hours are getting longer.
The average number of hours by Japanese regular employees -- excluding part-time workers -- increased to 168.4 per month in 2004 from 166.0 in 2001, according to a labor ministry survey.
Officially, the number of hours worked per person is on the decline in Japan. But this is because of a surge in part-time or contract jobs, which now account for a third of the workforce as Japan moves from a model of lifetime employment to less secure and often more stressful livelihoods.
Takashi Sumioka, a psychiatrist who specializes in work disorders, said his patients have shifted in the past few years from men in their 40s and 50s traumatized by unemployment and job relocation to men in their 30s putting in their all at their prime working age.
"Their working hours are seemingly getting longer and the mental strains they feel appear to be more severe than before," the doctor said.
"Mental stress is enormous, especially in workplaces that require workers to be fussy about details, for example computer-related jobs," he said.
Takamasa Ogawa, 71, a former sales representative for a small electronic parts company, collapsed from a stroke caused, he and his wife believe, by the intense stress of being pressured to work extra hours.
But because the overtime he put in was less than the government's standard for excessive, Ogawa's compensation was turned down at the labor inspection standard office and later at the Supreme Court. He remains half paralyzed in a wheelchair.
"He worked at home on weekends, adding to the hours that were officially registered," his wife Yoshika said, biting her lip in anger.
"But that wasn't taken into account. My testimony wasn't regarded as credible because I'm his wife."
Chikanobu Okamura, a lawyer who has long fought to put an end to karoshi, said that Ogawa's long, unrecognized hours were far from unusual in Japan.
"It's still very difficult to make courts acknowledge the hidden or unregistered overtime that companies force employees to work," Okamura said.
"And on top of that, the laws are insufficient to save all of the people who are suffering from excess work."
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