TOKYO - After Keizo Obuchi, the Japanese Prime Minister, suffered his stroke, it took most of last week for the surprise and panic to subside.
For almost a day, the Government kept its leader's condition a secret; even on Friday, the newly inaugurated Prime Minister, Yoshiro Mori, was speaking of his
shock and grief at succeeding his old friend in such circumstances.
It was no secret that Obuchi had a pacemaker, but he had not complained of aches and pains, did not appear poorly, and his last medical checkup showed no particular problems.
At the age of 62, in a country famous for longevity, Obuchi might have expected 20 more years of good health. But as the week wore on, a new question presented itself: not why Obuchi fell ill so suddenly, but how on earth he lasted for so long.
The background to his sudden illness came out in a remarkable briefing by his outgoing deputy press secretary, Akitaka Saiki, who described in some detail Obuchi's extraordinary work regime.
In his 20 months as Prime Minister, he took no more than three full days off. During weekdays and Saturdays, he rose at 6 am and started at the office at 8 am - or much earlier if there was a cabinet meeting to be chaired.
Work - including meetings and hosting official receptions - occupied him until 11 pm, and he had fallen into the habit of waking in the middle of the night to review paperwork and read reports.
His four or five hours of sleep were broken, and even on Sundays there were visitors to receive and paperwork to catch up on.
His last real holiday - two days of golf and relaxation in the mountain resort of Karuizawa - was eight months ago.
In the week before his collapse, he had to deal with a volcanic eruption that displaced 15,000 people in the northern island of Hokkaido, and the defection from his Government of a coalition partner.
Then he began to complain of dizziness. He was taken to hospital, and by that evening he had fallen into a coma from which he may never reawake. All Prime Pinisters work hard, of course and Obuchi's case would not be so surprising if it was just the tragedy of one man in exceptional circumstances.
In fact, he is just the most prominent among tens of thousands of Japanese who die, commit suicide or fall sick every year as a direct result of murderously long working hours.
The situation has generated a word, which has been adopted for use in English by the United Nations International Labour Organisation: karoshi, or death by overwork.
Such tragedies occur all over the world, of course, but not in the same way as in Japan. In Europe and America, victims of fatal work stress are typically at the top end of the employment scale - managers, executives and dealers whose high responsibilities are matched by high rewards.
"In Japan both presidents and production line workers die from stress," says Hiroshi Kawahito, of the National Defence Council for Victims of Karoshi. "That indicates the seriousness of the problem."
No one knows precisely, but Kawahito believes that at least 10,000 Japanese die from karoshi every year, not including those - like Obuchi - whose lives are blighted by serious illness, disability or depression.
The most prominent case in recent years was that of Ichiro Oshima, a 24-year-old employee of Dentsu, the world's biggest advertising agency.
Oshima's career as a junior executive was even shorter than Obuchi's tenure as Prime Minister and, from the account which his family's lawyers gave in court, he worked even harder.
In his last month of life, he was regularly in the office until as late as 6 am; he slept on average for between two hours and half an hour a night. In 1991, he became clinically depressed and killed himself.
Last month, after seven years of hearings in court, the Supreme Court ruled that Dentsu was liable for the young man's death.
Japanese working hours are difficult to calculate because the official Government figures derive from figures submitted by employers, who exclude unofficial and unpaid overtime.
By this reckoning, average annual working hours have declined from 2200 in 1988 to 1980 in 1997 - comparable with Britain and the United States. But surveys of workers themselves put the figure at 2500 hours or, in industries like banking, 3000 hours a year - the equivalent of 12 hours a day in a five-day working week.
The irony, of course, is that beyond a certain point long hours diminish efficiency, not only over the short term, but over a lifetime.
TOKYO - After Keizo Obuchi, the Japanese Prime Minister, suffered his stroke, it took most of last week for the surprise and panic to subside.
For almost a day, the Government kept its leader's condition a secret; even on Friday, the newly inaugurated Prime Minister, Yoshiro Mori, was speaking of his
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