Not wanting to lose the time you lose time and soul. You’re losing the pulley so much wanting to win it.Jose Bergamin. It is so short our traffic through this dimension that we must know to properly handle the work and not that this caught us and bring us until death ends. The Japanese call this karoshi. As lanacion.com.ar reminds us, the most approximate to the Spanish translation would be death by overwork, an evil that produces more than 100 annual victims in Japan, despite the efforts of the Government to educate a society with an inflexible work culture. It is said, the first report of a case of karoshi dating back to 1969, when a 29-year-old man died exhausted in the dispatch of the largest newspaper in Tokyo area. However, the Japanese Ministry of labour recently began to compile statistics in 1987.

According to specialists, the medical causes of death by overwork (heart attack and stroke, the two most common) due to the long working hours that Japanese workers are subjected. In several cases, found that the victims were working around 3000 hours per year. In an informal calculation, if the Franks and holidays, are discounted workers completed hours of work between 11 and 12 hours. More than one hundred of Japanese, is calculated, die annually by karoshi. Concerned by these figures, the Government launched a prevention campaign. Among other measures, the Ministry of Labour promotes the respect of maternity leave and the use of teleconferencing as an alternative to the daily transfer to big cities.

So far, however, the results have not been too successful. In 2006, according to official data, 355 workers fell ill by work inordinately. Of them, 147 died. The figure represents an increase of nearly eight percent over the previous year. For Dr. Katsuo Nishiyama, Shiga University, in Kyoto, evil is due to the thoroughness of Japanese culture.