Karoshi #1

Japan's top advertising agency, Dentsu, has begun turning out the lights at 10 p.m. to get their employees to go home. Most other businesses apparently don't turn out the lights at 10 p.m., letting people work their lives away.

There's a Japanese term - karoshi - for "death by overwork."

Excessive overwork is changing society, according to a Harvard sociologist, and it exacerbates other dysfunction. The number of births required to sustain a society is 2.1 per woman, but Japan's current birth rate is 1.41, maybe too low to recover from. The sociologist says, "This is death to the family."

photo: businessinsider.com

(cont'd tomorrow)