Jobs Take a Deadly Toll on Japanese

“Sometimes I really feel like slugging someone,” confesses the semiconductor salesman as he emerges from a 10-minute, $10 shoulder massage in a stress-busting salon near Tokyo Station.

It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Thursday, and the 43-year-old corporate warrior is headed back to the office at a trot. The desire to deck someone is particularly unacceptable in Japan, where people are trained from childhood to suppress anger so as to preserve social harmony.

“Of course, I would never do such a thing,” the salesman adds quickly. Instead, he says, he drinks nearly every night and gets a massage as often as he can afford.

Stress has become topic No. 1 in Japan since the economy plunged into the worst slump in half a century, promises of lifetime employment faded, and working longer and harder for the same money became the price of keeping one’s job.

Battling anxiety is a multimillion-dollar business here, with sales skyrocketing for everything from aromatherapy ingredients to “healing” music and stress-relief CDs, reflexology and massage studios, incense, herbs, teas and sleeping pills. Japan has even begun manufacturing such high-tech relaxation aids as a virtual fish tank, whose digital denizens glide soothingly through water that never needs changing, and a $145 robot jellyfish marketed as a companion for lonely bathers while they steep away their worries in the tub.

But stress has never been in the news as much as it has in the days since Japan’s most famous workaholic, former Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, suffered a stroke early this month and slipped into a coma. Aides said Obuchi, 62, probably took no more than three days off in his 20 months in office. The belief here is that he was felled by the national malady: stress and fatigue due to overwork.

Doctors and social critics say Obuchi’s collapse should be a wake-up call to a nation that loses at least 10,000 men each year to karoshi, a word coined in the 1970s that means death by overwork.

They blame unspoken yet tenacious attitudes: that any man worth his salt should work without complaint until he drops; that to sleep any more than absolutely necessary is self-indulgent; that stress is a kind of status symbol because it proves how busy, how in-demand, how indispensable the sufferer is; and that vacations are for students, slackers or also-rans.

“Being exhausted is considered a virtue,” the late noted psychiatrist Masao Miyamoto complained in 1997, adding, “Japanese accept that foreigners can take vacations, but we can’t.”

“When Japanese are not working, they feel guilty,” agreed Dr. Hirokazu Monou, head of the department of behavioral medicine at Fukushima Rosai Hospital in northeastern Japan. Monou reports a sharp rise since 1998 in the number of patients suffering from depression due to overwork, anxiety or exhaustion.

Monou believes that even more than overwork, it is suppressed anger--including rage at the corporate restructuring that is shaking so many midcareer men--that causes serious illness.

In public, Obuchi was the ever-genial, unflappable, self-effacing embodiment of a nation that sees displays of anger as childish and self-destructive. But Monou and others now wonder whether the prime minister’s fatigue was due not only to his famously long hours and lack of sleep but also to private fury at his political rival, Ichiro Ozawa, who repeatedly threatened to pull out of a coalition with Obuchi’s Liberal Democratic Party. The day before Obuchi collapsed, he turned the tables and kicked out Ozawa.

A nation’s stress level is hard to measure, but in a 1998 survey by the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, a Tokyo think tank, 68% of respondents said they often felt worried or anxious, up from 37% in a comparable survey in 1990. The percentage reporting that they experienced irritation or anger had risen from 46% to 74%.

Depression Seems to Be Deepening Nationwide

Whether due to anger, anxiety or fatigue, depression appears to be increasing in Japan, experts say. The suicide rate jumped 26% between 1997 and 1998, the year the Japanese economy was shaken to its roots by the Asian financial crisis. Of the 31,755 suicides in 1998, police attributed 1,877 to work-related problems--nearly double the number in 1991.

In eastern Japan alone, 228 people jumped to their deaths in front of trains in 1998, the national railway reported.

“So many commuter trains were stopped because of suicides that we were really made aware of how often it happened,” said Hakuhodo researcher Takayo Yamamoto.

Amid such general gloom, Japanese also took less vacation time in 1998, the last year for which such official statistics are available. Workers were entitled to an average of 17.5 paid days off but took only 9.1. That was down from 9.5 vacation days taken in 1995, according to the Labor Ministry.

Official statistics show that paid overtime has decreased since 1996; but it is common knowledge here that informal, unpaid overtime by office workers has shot up.

“They’re working up to 50 hours of overtime a month, catching the last train home and leaving early in the morning again, but they only get paid for 30 hours of overtime,” said Toshio Sasaki, a counselor at a mental health hotline in Osaka. “They have no Saturdays or Sundays off, because the number of employees has been shrunk through restructuring and those who remain have to do the same volume of work.”

Last month, the Japanese Supreme Court ruled that advertising giant Dentsu must pay compensation to the family of a 24-year-old employee who killed himself in 1991 after a workathon in which he averaged 80-hour weeks.

Sasaki’s karoshi hotline is a national effort launched by the Labor Ministry in 1994 to reduce such deaths and illnesses. Though it’s difficult to define which deaths are attributable to overwork, claims by relatives of people who have died or attempted suicide rose from 11 in 1994 to 60 in the first nine months of 1999.

In response, the Labor Ministry on March 1 began an advertising campaign urging people who feel that they are succumbing to workplace stress or fatigue to call the hotline for anonymous counseling. The volume of calls received in Osaka increased tenfold, to 40 or 50 in the past five weeks. And they have continued to pour in since Obuchi’s collapse, Sasaki said.

Many Worried Wives Calling Stress Hotline

Many calls come from wives who are terrified about their husbands’ health. Some say their spouses are showing signs of mental distress. Others describe men who have high blood pressure but refuse to see a doctor, citing a lack of time, Sasaki reported.

A recent Ministry of Health and Welfare study found that Japanese report being much more fatigued than their counterparts in Western industrialized countries. In a survey of 3,015 people ages 15 to 69, 59% said they were tired, whereas similar surveys in Europe and the United States have found only 15% to 30% of respondents complaining of fatigue, said the lead researcher, Dr. Akito Kitani. Moreover, 36% of the Japanese surveyed said they had been experiencing fatigue for more than six months.

About 20% of those surveyed said they had decreased their activity levels as a result, Kitani said. What struck Kitani was that 30% identified the cause of their fatigue as overwork but were not doing anything about it.

The survey did not ask how much those suffering from fatigue were sleeping. But sleep deprivation is a common complaint, especially in Tokyo, where long working hours are followed by commutes that often require standing for an hour crushed against strangers in hideously overcrowded trains.

“They would be strange if they didn’t feel stress,” said Akiyoshi Nakayama, managing director of Global Sports, which operates a chain of quick-massage parlors that has grown from one facility outside Tokyo Station in 1996 to 25 salons nationwide today. Nakayama brought a shoulder to his ear and leaned his head against a raised arm to mime the muscular contortions of an exhausted straphanger on a train.

“Then they get to the office, where they have to fight it out with competitors, and maybe their performance isn’t so great,” Nakayama said. “All they can say at the end of the day is ‘I’m tired.’ ”

Lack of sleep is a problem in all age groups. In a 1996 survey of Osaka high school students, 80% said they felt stressed, 86% said they weren’t getting enough sleep, and 40% said they slept less than six hours a night, up from 20% who slept so little 15 years ago.

Insomnia, anxiety’s companion, also seems to be on the rise. A private pharmaceutical industry survey found sales of sleeping drugs had soared 32% since 1993, to $424.5 million last year.

Though so far apparently only men are dying of overwork, stress levels are very high among women in their 20s and 30s. Many for the first time are being given positions of responsibility and are working night and weekend shifts that used to be off limits to females by law. They are paying the price in tension.

“Women who might have been more accustomed to flight now have to fight,” said stress specialist Masaki Okada.

Young women are driving sales of almost any product that purports to ease turbulent minds, anxious hearts or clenched muscles. It’s all part of what the Japanese media have dubbed the iyashi boom, a variant of the old Japanese medical verb for “to heal” that morphed into a New Age term roughly six years ago, Hakuhodo researcher Yamamoto said.

Della Inc., a CD production company that started selling relaxation music in 1993, has seen its sales multiply tenfold in the past five years, said its president, Hideo Utsugi. According to a market survey by the Yano Research Institute, the market for aromatherapy products hit $75 million in 1999, while reflexology earned $4.2 million and an estimated 6,000 quick-massage parlors raked in $1.4 billion. The massage figure does not include what Japanese spend on traditional massages when visiting hot springs, which remain the most popular way to unwind here.

But for the electronic giant NEC, stress may turn out to be the mother of invention. NEC’s virtual aquarium began as a government-sponsored research program into high-definition television technologies, said Shinji Kataoka, a senior marketing manager. To test the image, scientists built a giant screen and broadcast life-size footage of a shark, then played around with images of tropical fish. Researchers found the fish so soothing that they decided to market the aquarium.

The first virtual aquarium, priced at more than $11,000, sold 4,000 units. NEC has since downsized it into the “Fish Club Jr.,” which costs $5,000, including software. Kataoka said he’s been stunned by the sales--8,000 since 1998. The aquariums, with 17 software titles featuring different varieties of fish, are popular in hotel lobbies, beauty parlors, dentists’ waiting rooms and fish stores.

The electronic aquariums are especially popular with elderly people, who find them calming and maintenance-free, according to NEC. And some hospitals say they prefer virtual fish, which never upset patients by floating belly up.

Now, NEC plans to take the digital fish tank global, transferring the images onto DVD and adding relaxation music, Kataoka said. The anti-stress disks should hit the market in June or July, and the company hopes to sell 100,000 of them in Japan and overseas, he said.

He believes the market for such products will only expand.

“Japanese are bad at expressing our personalities,” he explained. “It’s because we repress ourselves, suppress our individuality, that we feel so much stress.”

Kataoka thinks spending time with his family is still the best relaxation of all, and though he’s rooting for the success of his product, he confessed, “I think it’s sad that it can sell.”