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In Japan it happens so often they have their own word for it: karoshi. Sararimen fall over dead at their desks, and others simply avert their eyes and focus on
by theorique 13y ago
In Japan it happens so often they have their own word for it: karoshi.
Sararimen fall over dead at their desks, and others simply avert their eyes and focus on their work while a manager urgently calls for white-gloved personnel to spirit the corpse away to the undertaker.
Nobody even misses a beat. The work must go on.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jbm 13y agoKaroushi incidents are national news and are rare (although overwork is common, for reasons that are too much to get into in this post). These also happen in Korea and other parts of Asia; more so than Japan now, possibly. I'm breath taken by the casual disregard for life that you imply the Japanese have.
- Gigablah 13y agoIt reads like overdramatized amateur fiction.
- jbm 13y agoBusy people, in general, avoid getting caught in other people's problems. Tokyo is filled with people who are busy. They may ignore beggars on the street and may not give up their seats. Taking it from there to an extreme (that they are immune to any fear of death) is an ugly reaction. During the 3/11 earthquake, I was shocked and appalled by the stupidity of one of my co-workers who went on coding as normal while the building shook. (It was experienced as a Shindo 6 earthquake in Yokohama, so it was quite strong - I never ever experienced anything like it in my life). He probably saw it as macho, but it was dangerous - other people then were confused as what to do. He eventually left the company for not being very competent. (Good riddance.) For every person like him, there were 50-100 people on the staff who were shocked, shaking, crying or scared. I find they reacted pretty much as I'd expect people in any school in Canada would have reacted. It certainly was more-or-less how we reacted when one of our class fellows put an end to his life. I find it distasteful that people fetishise another group of people (especially people with the same capitalist democratic strain of lifestyle) to the extent that they basically superhuman or inhuman.
- atgm 13y agoThis makes no sense. 過労死 is just a compound word basically consisting of "too much work death." Using your "they have a word for it so it's common and blithely ignored" logic, you could say that "infanticide" happens all the time and is ignored in English-speaking countries simply because there's a word for it.
- thesteamboat 13y agoOr the word "decimation". How often do we round up a group of people and kill every tenth?
- philwelch 13y ago> you could say that "infanticide" happens all the time and is ignored in English-speaking countries It does, but most cases can be covered up as SIDS.
- ewoodrich 13y agoI'm seriously wondering, do you have a citation for that? I've never heard that mentioned before now.
- philwelch 13y agoYou don't find it a little suspicious that there's a widespread medical euphemism for "this baby suddenly asphyxiated and we don't know how?" OK, not all SIDS cases are infanticide, most probably aren't, but it's nearly impossible to tell for sure. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/19/nyregion/investigating-a-rash-of-sids-deaths-exposing-infanticide.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/19/nyregion/investigating-a-r... http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(04)17673-3/fulltext http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
- ekianjo 13y agoWhat the hell are you talking about? People don't die from work exhaustion at their desks in Japan. I live in Japan and I've never even remotely heard of anything like that through my years here. And Karoshi is not even used the way you pretend it's used. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.
- JasonFruit 13y agoThere was a rash of news reports about fifteen years ago suggesting exactly that: that people regularly die at their desks in Japan from overwork. Since then, I've read that it was a vast exaggeration, but perhaps the person to whom you're responding missed those reports. They may not know what they're talking about, but it's probably not entirely their fault.
- ekianjo 13y agowell with Internet nowadays it's really easy to check the information compared to 15 years ago. There's really no excuse to write something as if you are sure of what you are saying without double checking, especially on these kind of topics.
- brazzy 13y agoPeople generally don't double-check things that make for interesting stories and fit their view of how the world works. And for almost everyone, when it comes to foreign places they have not personally visited, that view is made up of stereotypes frequently bordering on racism.
- theorique 13y agoArtistic license. I read the word karoshi years ago in some panicked news article in the USA.