Japan Ordered to Pay After Overworked Man Kills Self

In a nation of workaholics, a Japanese judge on Friday blamed a man’s suicide on exhaustion from working 80-hour weeks and ordered the government to compensate his family--possibly paving the way for thousands of such cases.

Before Mori Iijima hanged himself in his garage in 1985, he was driven to depression from overwork at his job in a machine shop, the Nagano District Court ruled.

Under Japanese law, the spouse and dependent children of a worker who dies from a job-related injury or illness can receive payments of about $17,000 a year from the government. Yet proving that overwork caused the suicide is extremely difficult.

In Iijima’s case, experts testified that he suffered from insomnia, extreme exhaustion and fears brought on by 150 hours of overtime each month.

Iijima’s case was only the second in Japan in which the government has been ordered to pay for suicide from overwork. There was a similar ruling in 1996, but it involved a suicide that occurred while the worker was on assignment outside the country.

“We welcome the ruling,” said Fumio Matsumura, lawyer for Iijima’s wife, Chieko, who filed the lawsuit in 1997. “Up to now, the government has taken the view that suicide is the individual’s choice and refused to help families.”

Matsumura estimated that as many as several thousand such cases could be filed in a nation dominated by an intense work ethic.

Matsumura and other lawyers say that such suicides are on the rise. The phenomenon is so common that there is even a term for them: karo-jisatsu.

The Labor Ministry official in charge of the case, Hiroji Koike, said the government was still studying the ruling, including the possibility of appeal.

If Iijima’s widow ultimately prevails, she will receive payments dating to the time of her husband’s death.

Chieko Iijima was not immediately available for comment Friday. In an interview last year, she said she sued because otherwise her husband would have died in vain.