Why Japanese People Work So Much — and Whether They Actually Want To

By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled

I want to tell you about a word that does not exist in English.

The word is karoshi (過労死). It is written with three characters: ka meaning excess, ro meaning labor, shi meaning death.

Death from overwork.

Japan needed this word badly enough that it created it. The phenomenon it describes — dying as a direct result of working too much, typically through heart attack, stroke, or suicide caused by work-related stress and exhaustion — was documented frequently enough, consistently enough, across enough industries and demographic groups, that the language required a specific term for it. The term entered common usage in the 1970s and has never become obsolete.

I want to be careful about how I use this word. Karoshi is not the experience of every Japanese worker. Most Japanese people who work long hours do not die from it. The existence of the word does not mean that every office in Japan is a health crisis waiting to happen.

But the existence of the word tells you something real about the culture that created it. No language invents a word for an experience that doesn’t occur often enough to require naming. The fact that Japan needed karoshi — that the phenomenon was common enough and recognized enough to require its own term — tells you something about the relationship between Japanese people and work that no amount of productivity statistics can fully convey.

This is the article where I try to tell you the truth about that relationship. As honestly as I can. Which means telling you things that are complicated, and things that reflect badly on a culture I love, and things that I have been thinking about for most of my working life.

The Numbers First

Before the why, the what.

Japan’s working hours are, by international standards, long. Not the longest in the world — several countries in Asia work more hours on average — but long enough, and distributed in specific ways that make the raw numbers somewhat misleading in both directions.

The official statistics show Japanese workers averaging approximately 1,600 to 1,700 hours of work per year — a figure that has declined significantly over the past three decades and is now broadly comparable to some European countries.

These numbers are, to put it diplomatically, incomplete.

The issue is mukyū zangyo — unpaid overtime. Japanese workers regularly work hours that are not recorded, not paid, and not reflected in any official statistic. The culture of staying late — of not leaving before your supervisor leaves, of demonstrating commitment through visible presence at the desk — means that a significant portion of Japanese working hours simply does not appear in the data.

Various surveys and studies have attempted to quantify unpaid overtime in Japan. The numbers vary, but a consistent finding is that when unpaid overtime is included, actual working hours for many Japanese employees — particularly in large companies, in certain industries, in managerial and professional roles — are substantially higher than official figures suggest.

The Japanese government, recognizing this problem, introduced work style reform legislation in 2018 that caps overtime and requires companies to record actual working hours more accurately. Progress has been made. The culture, however, changes more slowly than the legislation.

What the numbers tell us, with or without the adjustment for unpaid overtime: Japanese people work a lot. More than they need to. Often more than is good for them. And often — and this is the part I want to spend the most time on — not entirely because they want to.

The Historical Foundation: Work as Identity

To understand why Japanese people work the way they work, you need to understand where the work ethic came from and what it was originally attached to.

The immediate postwar period — the 1950s and 1960s — is the foundation. Japan in 1945 was a country of extraordinary devastation: cities destroyed, infrastructure collapsed, an economy in ruins, a population that had lost not only material security but the entire ideological framework that had organized Japanese society for decades.

What rebuilt Japan was, in significant part, work. Collective, determined, economically productive work on a national scale. The companies that drove Japan’s economic recovery — Panasonic, Toyota, Sony, Honda, and hundreds of others — grew from small operations to global manufacturers in a generation. The workers who built them worked extremely hard, and they saw the results of that work in their own lives: rising incomes, improving living standards, the gradual emergence of a mass middle class in a country that had, very recently, been in ruins.

In this context, work was not merely a job. Work was participation in something genuinely significant — in the reconstruction and transformation of a country. The sacrifice was real; the results were real; the connection between effort and outcome was visible.

The cultural framework that supported this work ethic drew on older values. Monozukuri — the art of making things — is a concept deeply embedded in Japanese culture, reflecting a long tradition of pride in craftsmanship and the satisfaction of skilled production. Ganbaru — to persist, to do one’s best, to not give up — is one of the most positively valued behavioral concepts in Japan, applied from children’s school sports days to senior executives’ quarterly reviews. The shokunin — the craftsman who devotes a lifetime to mastering a single skill — is a figure of cultural admiration.

These values — the dignity of skilled work, the virtue of persistence, the satisfaction of making something well — are genuinely admirable. They produced genuinely admirable things: the precision of Japanese manufacturing, the service culture of Japanese hospitality, the extraordinary craft traditions that persist in everything from ceramics to carpentry to cuisine.

The problem is what happened when these values were transplanted from craft and meaning into corporate bureaucracy.

The Corporate Machinery: How Work Culture Got Stuck

The salaryman — sararīman — is one of the defining figures of modern Japanese culture. The male office worker in a dark suit, carrying a briefcase, working for a large company, his identity organized around his corporate affiliation, his life structured by the rhythms of the organization.

The salaryman system, as it developed in the postwar decades, was built on a specific set of mutual obligations. The company offered: lifetime employment, seniority-based promotion, social status, and a comprehensive welfare system — housing loans, social clubs, health benefits, the organizational identity that told you who you were. The employee offered: complete loyalty, absolute availability, and the subordination of personal life to corporate need.

This was, in the high-growth decades, a functional arrangement. The company grew. The employee’s life improved. The exchange felt, if not exactly equal, at least coherent.

The arrangement began to crack in the 1990s, when Japan’s asset bubble burst and the economic assumptions underlying lifetime employment became unsustainable. Companies that had promised security began laying off workers. The implicit contract — your loyalty for our security — began to be honored by one side and not the other.

But the cultural practices that the contract had produced — the long hours, the visible presence, the subordination of personal life to corporate expectation — did not disappear with the contract that had justified them. They persisted as habits, as expectations, as the definition of what it meant to be a serious professional, long after the specific economic logic that had produced them had eroded.

This is the situation that many Japanese workers find themselves in today. Working within a system that was designed for a set of conditions that no longer fully exist, maintaining practices whose original rationale has partly dissolved, in organizations where the cultural expectations were set in decades that bear little resemblance to the present one.

The Mechanisms: How Long Hours Are Maintained

The persistence of long working hours in Japan is not simply a matter of individual choice or individual work ethic. It is maintained by a set of specific organizational and cultural mechanisms that create powerful incentives for working long and powerful disincentives for not doing so.

The Last to Leave Problem

In many Japanese offices, the implicit expectation is that junior staff do not leave before their seniors. Leaving at the official end of the working day when your supervisor is still at their desk is understood — not as rule, but as social convention — as a statement about your commitment. The person who leaves on time is the person who is not serious.

This convention creates a cascade. Senior staff stay because they are senior and because the job genuinely requires it. Junior staff stay because they cannot leave before their seniors. Middle managers stay because they have junior staff still at their desks and cannot be seen to leave before them. The result is a building full of people doing work of steadily declining quality — because genuinely productive work has a daily limit — while watching the clock and waiting for the person above them to stand up.

The work being done in the last two hours of this kind of workday is often, to be blunt, not particularly good work. It is the appearance of work. The performance of commitment. It is, in the language of this blog’s article on honne and tatemae, tatemae in the form of visible desk occupancy.

This mechanism is understood and acknowledged by most Japanese professionals I know. It is also, for many of them, very difficult to unilaterally exit. The person who leaves at five-thirty when everyone else is still at their desk has made a social statement whether they intended to or not. The individual cost of breaking the norm is borne entirely by the individual. The collective cost of maintaining the norm is borne by everyone but distributed widely enough that no single person bears it acutely.

The Meishi-Based Identity System

In Japan, the business card — meishi — is a significant cultural artifact. The ritual of exchanging meishi at the beginning of a professional encounter is precise and deliberate: the card is offered and received with both hands, examined with visible attention, placed carefully on the table in front of you rather than immediately pocketed.

The reason this matters is what the meishi represents. The card tells you, in a few characters, who a person is in the professional world: their company, their title, their position in a hierarchy. In Japan, for many people in many generations, this information is not a description of what you do. It is a description of who you are.

When professional identity is this deeply fused with personal identity — when the company you work for and the role you hold within it are primary answers to the question “who are you?” — the motivation to demonstrate commitment to that company becomes a motivation to demonstrate commitment to yourself. Working hard is not merely producing output. It is affirming your identity, your worth, your place in the social order.

This fusion of work and identity has real costs. When a person’s self-worth is organized around professional performance and corporate belonging, the prospect of leaving early, of taking all your vacation days, of setting limits on availability, feels threatening in a way that it would not if work were simply work.

The Vacation Problem

Japan has one of the most generous statutory vacation entitlements among developed economies — typically ten to twenty days of paid vacation per year depending on seniority. Japanese workers take approximately half of these days.

Not because they are legally prohibited from taking them. Not because their companies refuse requests. Because the culture makes taking vacation difficult.

Taking two consecutive weeks of vacation in Japan is, in many organizations, essentially impossible for any employee below a certain seniority level — not because anyone says so, but because the combination of absence guilt, concern about burdening colleagues, worry about being perceived as insufficiently committed, and the genuine reality of work that accumulates while you are absent makes the extended break feel more costly than it is worth.

Japanese workers who do take vacation tend to take single days attached to weekends, or the nationally defined holiday periods — Golden Week in late April and early May, Obon in August, New Year’s — when everyone is absent and the social cost of being absent is therefore minimal.

The government has been aware of this problem for decades. Various initiatives — including a recent push toward mandatory vacation usage — have had limited success against a cultural headwind that statistical mandates cannot easily shift.

Do Japanese People Actually Want to Work This Much?

Now we arrive at the question in the title. And the honest answer is: it depends on who you ask, and when you ask them, and what they understand by the question.

The Ones Who Genuinely Love It

There are Japanese professionals who work extremely long hours and would not have it otherwise. Not because they are forced to, not because of social pressure, but because they are genuinely, deeply engaged with what they do — because the work itself provides the satisfaction and meaning and identity that they want their lives to contain.

The shokunin tradition — the craftsman devoted to mastery — produces people who work long hours because the work is the thing, not the hours. The master sushi chef who arrives before anyone else and leaves after everyone else is not the victim of a culture of overwork. He is a person who has found the thing that he wants to spend his hours on.

This is real. I know people like this. The dedication is authentic and the satisfaction is genuine and it would be both inaccurate and condescending to describe their working lives as a problem to be solved.

The Ones Who Have Normalized It

There are Japanese professionals who work extremely long hours because it has been the condition of their working life for long enough that it has become simply what working life is. Not chosen, exactly — if asked, they would prefer more balance — but accepted. Accommodated. Built around.

These are the people for whom the question “do you want to work this much?” produces a pause. Not because the answer is complicated but because the question itself is slightly disorienting. It has not occurred to them, in any practical sense, that it could be otherwise. The hours are not experienced as excess. They are experienced as normal. And normal, by definition, is not something you want or not want. It is simply the shape of things.

I recognize this in myself, at certain points in my working life. The recognition that I had stopped noticing how much I was working — that the hours had dissolved into the texture of the day without generating any particular response — is one of the stranger experiences of middle age.

The Ones Who Are Exhausted and Cannot Stop

And then there are the ones for whom the long hours are genuinely costly — who are tired, who know they are tired, who would change things if they could, and who find the mechanisms of change more difficult to access than any outside observer would expect.

These are the people for whom the last-to-leave problem is a trap, not a convention. The ones whose identity is sufficiently organized around corporate belonging that leaving feels like abandonment. The ones who have been told, explicitly or implicitly, that their continued employment is conditional on their visible commitment. The ones who are simply in organizations where the culture has calcified into something that no individual decision can shift.

For these people, the question of whether they want to work this much has a clear answer. They do not. And the distance between that answer and their actual working lives is one of the genuine sources of suffering in Japanese professional culture.

The Generation Gap: What Is Changing

Here is the part of this story that is actually hopeful.

Younger Japanese workers — the generation currently in their twenties and early thirties — have a measurably different relationship with work than their parents’ generation. The surveys are consistent on this: younger Japanese workers are more likely to prioritize work-life balance over salary, more likely to leave a job that demands excessive overtime, more likely to take their vacation days, more likely to describe personal life as more important than professional achievement.

This generational shift has been visible enough that Japanese business media has spent the last decade writing about it with a mixture of alarm and grudging admiration. The young worker who declines to stay late when the work is finished, who takes their allotted vacation, who resigns from a company with a bad work culture rather than enduring it — this person is described in some quarters as yutori sedai (the relaxed generation) or satori sedai (the enlightened generation), terms that carry both admiration and a faint implication that something has been lost.

What has been lost, if anything, is the willingness to sacrifice personal life for corporate identity. What has been gained is a clearer-eyed relationship between work and the rest of life — a relationship that does not assume that the hours you spend at your desk are the primary measure of your worth as a person.

The work style reform legislation of 2018 — which caps overtime hours, requires companies to track actual working time, and establishes an employee’s right to refuse unreasonable overtime demands — has given this generational shift some structural support. The gap between legislation and culture remains significant. But the direction is clear.

The Thing That Does Not Change: The Craft Tradition

I want to end not with statistics or policy or generational trends but with something that I think represents the most genuinely admirable aspect of Japanese work culture — the part that I hope survives whatever reforms are necessary and whatever changes are overdue.

Japan has a word — shokunin kishitsu — that means roughly “the spirit of the craftsman.” It refers to a quality of attention and care and commitment to the work itself — to the process, to the materials, to the endless refinement of skill — that is independent of hours worked or salary received or corporate belonging.

The sushi chef who has been making the same preparations every morning for thirty years and still finds something to improve. The ceramicist who throws hundreds of bowls before keeping one. The engineer who runs the test again because something in the result was slightly less than what was possible. The cook who arrives early not because they are expected to but because the fish is best prepared when it is freshest and the fish arrives early.

This quality — this orientation toward the work itself rather than the performance of working — is real and it is beautiful and it produces things of genuine excellence. It is one of the reasons Japanese products, Japanese crafts, Japanese food, Japanese service have the reputation they have.

The problem is not the shokunin kishitsu. The problem is when the forms of devotion — the long hours, the visible presence, the subordination of personal life — are maintained without the spirit that originally justified them. When the performance of commitment replaces the commitment itself. When the tatemae of working late substitutes for the honne of genuine engagement.

The reform that Japanese work culture needs is not the elimination of dedication. It is the restoration of the connection between dedication and meaning. Work that is long because it is genuinely engaged is different from work that is long because the culture requires visible hours. The first produces shokunin. The second produces karoshi.

Japan, I think, knows this. The generation currently entering the workforce knows this more clearly than any generation before them. The question is whether the institutions and organizations and cultural habits that have accumulated over seventy years of postwar work culture can be reformed quickly enough to meet them.

I am cautiously hopeful. I say this as a 40-something who has experienced both versions of Japanese work culture — the one that asks too much for reasons that are no longer sufficient, and the occasional moments of genuine craft and meaningful effort that remind me why work, at its best, is one of the ways that human beings make something of their time.

The best version of Japanese work culture is worth preserving. The rest needs to change.

And slowly, imperfectly, it is.

— Yoshi 🍣 Central Japan, 2026

Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Honne and Tatemae: Japan’s Two Faces — and Why Both Are Real” and “I’ve Lived in Central Japan for 40 Years — Here’s What Tourism Sites Get Wrong About My Country” — both available on Japan Unveiled.