By COLIN DONALD
TOKYO - They called him the "cold pizza" Prime Minister and took his modest protestations of ordinariness at face value.
After his stroke, however, and now in death, the avuncular, unpopular Keizo Obuchi, aged 62, has acquired the glow of patriotic martyrdom. He sacrificed his health and his life in the service of Japanese recovery and in the process became the unignorable symbol of Japan's secret epidemic.
It is known as "karoshi" - death or disability caused by overwork - and it affects tens of thousands of Japanese every year, regardless of age, sex, or social position. Its cause is Japan's obsessive working practices, which routinely demand self-sacrifices no Western employer or worker would be asked for or would offer.
Although the pressures on a Prime Minister far exceed those of a "salaryman" or van driver, Obuchi's collapse has sharpened unease about the excessive demands Japanese society makes on the individual.
For a nation already engrossed in a struggle to re-invent itself, the sad fate of its leader is an abrupt wake-up call. According to lawyer Hiroshi Kawahito, secretary-general of the National Defence Council for Victims of Karoshi, the time has come for Japan to address the overwork taboo and to build a system that protects individuals from the tentacles of a work-centred culture.
"To draw a comparison," he says, "boxing is one of the most physically demanding sports. Some boxers suffer injuries and others die. However, even in boxing there are safety precautions in place, such as having ropes around the ring and bells to signal the ends of rounds.
"Do competitive Japanese companies observe similar restrictions? No. Japanese corporate warriors continue to fight to the death without any ropes or bells."
A conservative estimate puts the number of karoshi cases in Japan at 10,000, although the real figure may be nearer 30,000 and some even say 50,000, out of a working population of 60 million. The statistics are difficult to assess because allotting causes of various types of collapse to overwork is medically controversial and often socially embarrassing.
What is not in doubt is that while other countries, notably South Korea and the US, are familiar with work-related burnout, Japanese karoshi occurs throughout society, not just among senior executives.
Obuchi may have had heavy responsibilities, but his attitude to work is shared by the lowliest office worker. He was always on duty, took negligible amounts of time off at weekends, let alone holidays, and sacrificed his own "down time" to a round of one-on-one personal contacts with voters. Politically motivated gregariousness and poor time organisation proved fatal.
Trying to picture a Japanese Prime Minister heading to the beach for a summer fortnight is impossible, revealing the huge gap between Japanese and Western attitudes to work. Any business leader who took his full allowance of holiday to get away from it all would be dismissed as lightweight, possibly effeminate.
In a political leader, such frivolity would undermine confidence and probably cost him his job. The Japanese work ethic demands extraordinary stamina and commitment, an attitude with roots in the militarist 1930s and 1940s. Far from being diluted by post-war changes, the attitude was consolidated during the boom of the 1960s to 1980s. No sacrifice was considered too great, both for the company and for the greater good of revitalising the nation.
Although annual work hours are said to have decreased over the past decade, the official figures are highly questionable as they do not include unpaid overtime. Kawahito's research suggests male bank workers put in an average of 3000 hours a year, which evens out at 12 hours a day, Monday to Friday.
Now Japan has "caught up" with the West, other explanations for old habits abound. There are no religious grounds for ordaining Sundays a day of rest and time-zone difference makes it necessary for companies dealing with Europe and the US to work late into the night.
Most important, however, is the Japanese ideal of service which, rather than price, is the territory over which companies ferociously compete. In Japan, the saying goes, "the customer is god." Japanese visitors to Britain, for example, are amazed to see high-street shop assistants happily turfing out browsers and lowering the shutters as 5.30 pm approaches.
Kawahito believes something is obviously wrong when a desire to keep the customer happy leads to widespread breakdown. "We have to re-evaluate our consumer society," he said. "One advertisement for a home-delivery service company says, 'We accept your selfish delivery order.' This is a clear example of how excessively consumer-oriented we've become.
"We need to establish a lifestyle and work pattern that enables us to protect our health, although I am aware this will be very difficult. It is important for individuals to place personal limits on their work schedules. We should have the courage to ignore obligations when necessary. Workers should place priority on their personal health rather than their company and colleagues."
The work ethic is central to Japan's sense of itself as a country with few natural resources that invented itself as a world leader. The argument that the 24-hour culture is not "natural" for humans, and that fewer overtime hours might mean greater efficiency, are relatively weak in comparison.
In the meantime, anti-karoshi campaigners can only lobby the Ministry of Labour for more truthful reporting of working hours that includes the massive amounts of unpaid overtime, and encourage victims' families to press for compensation.
Out of 10,000 acknowledged karoshi cases, only 500 or 600 relatives claim compensation with labour standard inspection offices every year, and only around 100 families launch lawsuits against the employers. Regulation would be difficult to impose, not least because Japanese trade unions often share the employers' outlook.
"I feel that Japanese companies can be very cool when dealing with karoshi cases, which are in a way similar to military deaths," said Kawahito. "However, when soldiers die in battle, their deaths are honoured and their families receive compensation. When corporate warriors die, their deaths are not praised, but rather they are sometimes harshly criticised and most of their families do not receive any sort of compensation."
No doubt there were some who secretly thought the worse of Obuchi for collapsing under the strain, although for many others his fate may serve as a warning - work smarter, ignore peer pressure, and lighten up.
Japan's corporate warriors dying to make sacrifices
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