過労死

Karoshi is brutally modern. The term 過労死, literally death from overwork, emerged in Japan in the 1970s as physicians, labor activists, and grieving families tried to name a pattern that polite corporate culture preferred to treat as private tragedy. The word was already socially explosive by 1978. It was diagnosis, accusation, and obituary at once.

Japan's high-growth decades after 1955 created the conditions. Salarymen were praised for endurance, loyalty, and invisibly long hours, while strokes, heart failure, and sudden collapse were explained away as bad luck. The coinage forced a causal link into public language. Once a thing has a name, denial gets harder.

In the 1980s and 1990s, court cases, compensation claims, and media coverage carried karoshi beyond specialist circles. English-language journalism borrowed it directly because no native term was as sharp or as socially loaded. Overwork was too soft. Burnout was too psychological.

Today karoshi is used far beyond Japan, often as a warning about work cultures that glorify self-erasure. The word remains distinctly Japanese in form, but its relevance is not national at all. Industrial modernity keeps producing the condition. The corpse is the footnote.