Japan, The King of Overwork

追加: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Japan is well known for overworking until exhaustion. You've probably seen videos like these and heard about Kroshi, Death by overwork, Japan's own word for it. I have even talked about it in a couple previous videos. So, you might think Japan works the longest hours in the entire world, right? Well, it doesn't. According to OECD data, Japan is not the final boss of average annual working hours anymore. It is not even the most ridiculous country in the room. By the spreadsheet, Japan looks almost normal, which makes the question more important. If Japan is not the statistical king of overwork anymore, why does it still feel like the country where a grown man must apologize for being tired? The easy answer, Japanese people are workaholics. The real answer is the kind of thing you only believe after you have seen the bodies. Yes, bodies. Japan has a word the rest of the world had to borrow because their own languages did not have one yet. We will get there, but first you need to understand what the Japanese office actually was. And if you are watching this from outside Japan feeling superior, relax. Your country probably does the same thing. It just phrases it differently.

[00:00:58]The old Japanese company was not just a place that paid you. It was a script for the rest of your life. You joined after university, wore the same black suit as every other nervous graduate, learned the same company song, >> drank with the same co-workers, waited for the same promotions, and eventually became the older man, telling young workers that suffering builds character because admitting otherwise would make your entire 20s look like a clerical error. This was the classic lifetime employment bargain. You gave the company loyalty, patience over time, your best years, your liver, and several evenings that could have been spent developing a personality. In return, the company gave you stability, identity, and a socially approved reason to never be home. For a while, that bargain made sense. Postwar Japan was rebuilding. Companies needed loyal workers. Workers needed stability.

[00:01:41]The office became a second family, except this family had performance reviews and a fax machine that somehow survived into the smartphone era. Then, the economy changed. The bubble burst.

[00:01:50]Wages stagnated. Non-regular work grew.

[00:01:53]The guarantee weakened, but the emotional software stayed installed.

[00:01:56]That is the trap. Japan modernized the economy without fully uninstalling the guilt. A worker today can live in a world of temporary contracts, weak raises, job apps, and declining loyalty.

[00:02:06]But they will still be ashamed if they don't show loyalty, or worse, if they quit the job. Companies no longer protect you like a family. Still, they manipulate you emotionally so you feel like leaving is betraying. This is why we can't simply dismiss all of this on Japanese being workaholic. Workaholics make it sound like they are addicted to spreadsheets. Most people are not addicted to spreadsheets. The deeper addiction is to being seen as dependable. In Japan, being dependable often means noticing what nobody else wants to say. You read the atmosphere.

[00:02:32]You sense the room. You understand that the meeting is over, but nobody stands because the boss has not stood. You understand that the deadline is impossible, but saying so would damage the mood. You understand that your paid leave is legally yours, but your coworker will have to cover the task.

[00:02:45]And now your vacation comes with emotional interest. The workday becomes a test of social sensitivity. They won't ask if you finish the job. But did you finish the job without making anyone feel the weight of you existing? That is a much harder exam. This exam is not only hard in Japan, though. Many cultures can induce stress. And if you feel the same way, you're not the only one. Which brings me to a really important milestone for Rice Degree. We have our first sponsorship. Ladies and gentlemen, here's BetterHelp. It helps support the channel. So bear with me for a minute while I tell you why they're relevant to today's video. Got it? If you grew up in any culture that trained you to read a room before reading your own exhaustion, therapy is one of the first places where the room gets to be about you for an hour. I know that reflex too well. A friend asked me to just take a quick look at his startup deck. The same week I had two deadlines and a video to upload. I said, "Yeah, sure." Then I sat at my desk for 40 minutes, hating him for asking, hating myself for agreeing, and pretending the third coffee was for the flavor. The problem was not one evil person draining me. The problem was that I treated every boundary like a diplomatic incident.

[00:03:42]Therapy helped me notice that pattern before resentment became my entire personality with an upload schedule.

[00:03:47]Therapy helped me understand why boundaries felt so dramatic to me. I was treating every small no like a character flaw. While saying no is actually something really powerful. Better Help makes starting therapy easier. You take a quiz, get matched with a licensed therapist quickly, and can talk by phone, video, or text depending on what fits your life. If the first therapist is not the right fit, you can switch anytime at no extra cost. So, if this topic is hitting close to your own I am fine routine, click the link in the description or go to betterhelp.com/riseddeed to get 10% off your first month of therapy. Back to Japan, where I am fine became less of a sentence and more of a national employee handbook.

[00:04:25]The funny thing about Japan's overwork reputation is that the spreadsheet has become less dramatic than the stereotype. OECD's 2024 Japan survey lists average annual hours worked at 1,607 below the OECD comparison figure in the same table. That does not exactly sound like a country where every office worker is chained to a desk while a manager feeds them printer paper for protein. And Japan has changed the law.

[00:04:48]The work style reform rules introduced legal overtime caps from 2019 for large companies and 2020 for smaller ones. In principle, overtime is capped at 45 hours a month and 360 hours a year. Even exceptional cases have limits. Japan basically looked at its companies and said, "Please stop treating human beings like rechargeable office equipment." And to be fair, there is evidence the reforms helped. A 2026 Oriti study found that the 2019 overtime cap significantly reduced long working hours and improved self-reported health and work life balance. So why does the myth still feel true? Because overwork culture is not only measured in hours, it is measured in the emotion attached to stopping.

[00:05:25]Japan's paid leave numbers show the problem perfectly. MEMHLW data for the 2024 survey shows workers use 65.3% of their annual paid leave. Expedia's 2024 survey put Japan last among 11 surveyed regions for paid vacation usage. And in a follow-up said 53% of Japanese workers felt guilty toward colleagues who cover their work. That number is like wearing a tie through the whole video. The law says you can rest. The calendar says you can rest. HR says technically yes, please enjoy your government approved 5-day human maintenance period. And the atmosphere says your team will always remember.

[00:06:03]Like I said, it's not just Japan. Every country has a workplace mask. In America, the mask says, "I am so excited to announce." In Britain, it says, "No worries." Which means there are many worries. And at least one of them has teeth. In Japan, the mask says, "I will endure." The Japanese word people often use is gammon. Enduring hardship with patience and dignity. It is not a bad concept. After disasters, it can look beautiful. People cue calmly. They avoid making their suffering everyone else's problem. But every virtue has a toxic version. Patience becomes silence.

[00:06:33]Dignity becomes denial. Endurance becomes a workplace subscription plan.

[00:06:37]You forgot to cancel in 1998. That is how stress becomes professionalism. The ideal employee does not simply complete tasks. He absorbs discomfort without leaking it into the room. He drinks with the team even when his body is begging for a vegetable and 8 hours of sleep. If he is struggling, he apologizes for struggling. If everyone hides stress, the office looks functional. If nobody complains, the manager can pretend conditions are fine. If the exhausted worker smiles, the system gets to file him under resilient and move on. This is how a workplace turns warning signs into manners. The mask is useful until it traps you behind it because eventually the body stops respecting the performance.

[00:07:17]Japan has a word the rest of the world had to borrow because work life imbalance sounded too cute for what was happening. Kroshi, death from overwork.

[00:07:26]I already made a whole video about Kroshi and Asia's deadliest work cultures. So, I'm not going to reopen the entire debate here. Kroshi is not the whole story. The point is not that some people worked impossible hours, but those impossible hours could be dressed up as seriousness and loyalty until the body had to make the argument in a language no manager could politely ignore. She is Matsuri Takahashi, a 24-year-old employee at the advertising giant Densu who took her own life on the very Christmas day of 2015. She was quote unquote forced to work 100 hours overtime per month. And the quotes are just to remind you that they are not technically forced to work like somebody is pointing a gun at them. But the pressure around it pretty much gives them no other option if they even dream to become somebody at their company.

[00:08:07]This girl usually had 10 hours of sleep.

[00:08:09]You might think at least that's more than the recommended eight. But no. 10 hours of sleep for an entire week. 10 hours of sleep for 100 overtime hours.

[00:08:16]Don't you feel like the numbers don't add up? Well, that's because in life she confessed that her boss oftenly harassed her to falsify and hide hours. Meaning the official version of 100 hours a month was most likely manipulated. If we take in consideration her own testimony, she said working 20 hours a day was kind of common. We could conclude she worked some amount of hours between 200 up to 400 extra hours per month. Extra hours.

[00:08:38]That isn't counting her actual shift. I have seen psychopaths being more considerate towards their victims than this company. And she is sadly just one of the many cases that happened and are happening right now as you watch this video. Japan knows this is a problem that matters. This is not a cartoon villain country where every boss wakes up, adjusts his tie, and whispers, "How can I reduce morale today?" The government passed reforms. Companies track overtime more carefully. Paid leave rules changed. Some workplaces really did improve. The RIT study on the 2019 cap suggests long hours fell without wrecking wages or skill investment, which is exactly the kind of finding policy makers frame and hang on the wall. But culture is harder to reform than a statute. You can cap overtime. You cannot easily cap the look your manager gives when you pack your bag first. You can mandate 5 days of paid leave. You cannot mandate that the employee stops apologizing for taking them. You can tell a company to respect work life balance. You cannot magically remove the little voice in a worker's head that says, "If I rest, someone else suffers." So, younger workers started looking for side doors. One side door is literal. Japan now has resignation agencies. Companies that call your boss and tell them you quit because the worker cannot face the conversation.

[00:09:45]Tell me in the comments if you would like to see a full video about that. It shows where the old overwork identity cracks. Older managers often see this as weakness. Young workers see it as refusing the humiliation ritual. So the younger generation is not always rebelling with slogans. Sometimes they rebel by leaving on time or by paying a stranger to say the sentence their office trained them to fear. So is Japan still the king of overwork by average hours? No. That crown is more complicated now. And anyone who says otherwise is probably using a statistic from 1997 and the confidence of a man explaining Japan because he watched one of those salary man YouTube videos. But culturally, yes. Remember the question I refused to answer at the start? Here it is. Japan remains the king because it made overwork feel moral. It took a normal economic problem and wrapped it in duty, harmony, adulthood, loyalty, shame, and the fear of inconveniencing others. That is much harder to defeat than a long shift. A long shift ends when you clock out. A guilty identity follows you home, takes off its shoes politely, and sits in the corner of your apartment asking why you are resting when someone else is still working. And that is the part viewers recognize even if they have never worked in Japan.

[00:10:50]Because a culture that cannot respect rest eventually starts mistaking damage for discipline. And that is why Japan is the king of overwork.