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Working Working Working~~~~ A record number of Japanese people worked themselves to death last year despite a government campaign to ease the country's notorious office hours. Some 355 workers fell severely ill or died from overwork in the year to March, the highest figure on record and 7.6 percent up from the previous year, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labour said. Of the total, 147 people died, many from strokes or heart attacks. Death from overwork grew so common during Japan's post-World War II economic miracle that a word was coined for it, "karoshi." The government has tried to address the problem by promoting telecommuting and encouraging workers to take leave when they start families or need to care for elderly parents. Critics point to the rising number of part-time jobs, saying new employees lack the security that would allow them to resist pressure to overwork. Another 819 workers contended they became mentally ill due to overwork, with 205 cases given compensation, according to the ministry data released on Wednesday. Mentally troubled workers killed themselves or attempted to do so in 176 cases, of which a record 66 cases were found eligible for benefits, the ministry report said. The number of Japanese who killed themselves because of work jumped 52 percent last year, while work-induced mental illness also hit a record high, according to Health Ministry official Junichiro Kurashige. Japan's suicide rate is among the highest in the industrialized world. More than 32,000 people took their own lives in 2004, most of them older people suffering financial woes as the country struggled through a decade of economic stagnation. The Japanese government has earmarked substantial budget for programs to help those with depression and other mental illnesses. 
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8/18/2010 8:42 am |
很複雜...... The Japanese government has earmarked substantial budget for
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8/18/2010 10:42 am |
Its a bad problem here in the U.S as well. we call them work-a-halics.
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this is sad, during the hey day, of money flowing freely in Japan, people unfortunately abandoned the ways of their past elders, and they not only spent the saving of the elders, as inheritance, they leveraged the homes their elders, worked hard to preserve. The Lifetime employment from the post World wWar II western infusion of capital to drive industry, all these things, fed a false illusion of unending prosperity. Japanese traveled the world, buying up everything on many lands, and the crash of the Real Estate market in the mid 80's took everything back, and industry which was leveraged with real estate backing, caused many industry to cut back. This forced a mad dash of Japanese to buy into the delusion of "OUTSOURCING", and they forgot their people need to work, but they also need to earn. The rate of pay was high, and the cost of goods and services, skyrocketed, based on the false illusion of unending, prosperity. Now, they can't get the industry back, and the property is out of reach of the average citizen. The same is happening to China, they did not learn from the Japanese, nor did they learn from the US, they are pushing ahead with planned growth at astronomical levels, 'all dependent on export profits".. and they ignore the backlash, of the world, as each nation, now resents giving away their own industry, and they can't yet, figure out how to take it back. China can't move all its people to be mass consumers, and the wealth it claims, is less than the wealth of other nations, total asset value. some nations till have economies, that are 100 times more valuable in measured valuation, than China, even though China may have less debt, it cannot accumulate nor equate the value of many Western nation. In context, their money is measured by a divide of the people factor, and the divide of the un-developed and improvised, China would be wise to see, that its power is in some ways a fiction, that can become a nightmare quickly. Many many other countries are not becoming more attractive, not only to others, but to Chinese as well. China has over the past 5-10 outsourced more than it should have, and more than it can afford to, but they are looking at dollars, rather than the value of the nations asset holding as a whole. Just the income ration are so far askew, when contrast against the world of nation. And the disparity of wealth is equally so a massive issue, which, at present they can't fix it. Japan unfortunately can't go backwards, because they tossed away those standards, for the modernization, without thought of what it cost to claim a lead. They found that the lead, was as much a duping process than a reality that could be sustained. now the people suffer, depression and suicide and every malady imaginable, as it spirals into a despaired state, in the context of Global factors.
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