Chris Gladis/Flickr In Japanese the word is karoshi, or "death from overwork." 
 
 The latest karoshi victim was 24-year-old Matsuri Takahashi, who worked for the Japanese ad agency Dentsu and reportedly logged 105 overtime hours in one month. At work she tried to maintain appearances, but on Twitter she spoke the truth. 
 
 "It's 4 a.m. My body's trembling," she reportedly said in one post. "I'm going to die. I'm so tired." 
 
 Takahashi leapt from the company dormitory around Christmas last year. This past Wednesday, Dentsu's president and CEO, Tadashi Ishii, announced he would resign in March. 
 
 Japan's government has been trying desperately over the past several years to change the cultural attitudes toward work. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe launched a "work style reform" panel seeking to make time off more alluring for Japanese workers. 
 
 Though the results have been mixed, some private companies have started to lead the change. 
 
 Dentsu, for its part, now forces people to take at least five days off every six months. It also shuts the lights off every night at 10 p.m. as an incentive for people to head home. 
 
 Other companies have opted to shift their allowable overtime hours to the morning. The trading house Itochu Corp. opens its doors at 5 a.m. for anyone who wants to avoid staying late at the office. Employees who show up early get treated to a light breakfast and earn the same extra wages they would have gotten at the end of the day. 
 
 But as Abe's reform signals, the country has larger issues related to overtime that it must address for the sake of public health. 
 
 A report from October, which examined karoshi cases and their cause of death, found that more than 20% of people in a survey of 10,000 said they worked at least 80 hours of overtime a month. And compared with the US, where 16.4% of people work an average of 49 hours or longer each week, in Japan more than 20% do. Half of all respondents said they give up taking paid vacations. 
 
 As per the report, many of the overwork deaths were caused by suicide, heart failure, heart attack, or stroke — all of which can be brought on by excessive stress. 
 
 Other companies have gotten more creative with how they encourage people to work less. At the Tokyo-based nursing care business Saint-Works, employees wear purple capes that display the time they should leave the office — an effort to erase all doubt when the day is over. 
 
 According to the South China Morning Post, people at the company are working half as many overtime hours since 2012, while profits continue to grow year-over-year. 
 
 The research into productivity suggests other firms would see similar gains if they required people to work less. After a certain threshold, extra time spent on tasks doesn't equate to extra output. As Sachio Ichinose told the SCMP, the extra hours serve only to make people more burned out. 
 
 "New ideas do not pop up after meetings are extended an extra two to three hours," he said. "Work becomes productive when it is balanced out with your private life." 
 
 If the new measures are successful, both employers and their workers will come to take that sentiment to heart. 

 TOKYO (AP) — Matsuri Takahashi's dream career at Japan's top ad agency, Dentsu, ended with her suicide as her overtime pushed past 100 hours a month. 
 
 "I'm emotionless and only wish to sleep," she wrote, exhausted and depressed, in a Twitter post in October 2015, six months after starting the job. On Christmas day, the 24-year-old leaped from a dormitory balcony, leaving behind a last email to her mother saying her work and life had become unbearable. 
 
 Takahashi's was not the first "karoshi," or death from overwork at Dentsu, a company notorious for demanding long hours from its employees. 
 
 Despite efforts over the past two decades to cut back on overwork, karoshi still causes hundreds of deaths and illnesses every year in Japan, affecting all sorts of workers, from elite "salary-man and career-woman" employees like Takahashi to IT technicians and manual laborers. 
 
 In August 2015, labor authorities caught Dentsu exceeding its own 70 hour monthly maximum overtime limit and ordered it to cut back. 
 
 Asked for comment, Dentsu said that as of October 2015, nobody was reporting overtime exceeding 70 hours. It now limits overtime to 50 hours a month. "We will keep trying to manage work appropriately, to curb long hours of work and maintain employees' health," Dentsu told The Associated Press in a statement. 
 
 But at Dentsu and many other companies, much overtime goes unreported, labor officials say. 
 
 On top of the 40-hour work week the Labor Standards Law sets for most workers, as an exception that serves as a loophole companies can establish voluntary ceilings for overtime. That make the law toothless, experts say. 
 
 In Japan's male-dominated, hierarchical corporate world, company interests tend to come first. Employees, especially young, foreign or female workers, are ill-placed to resist pressure from higher-ups to work extra-long hours or take on too much work. Older workers who retire from permanent positions with full benefits often are replaced by part-timers or chronically overworked contractors who likewise have little leverage and no union representation. 
 
 "Overtime is supposed to be for unanticipated occasions, but in Japan, it's become expected as part of daily duties that nobody can refuse," said Kansai University professor Koji Morioka, an expert on labor issues. "People are chronically working long hours because they have too much work to do as staff sizes have shrunk." 
 
 Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government wants companies to drastically cut working hours to enable men to help out more at home and create more job opportunities for women. But that strategy, dubbed "womenomics," appears to be making little headway. 
 
 Takahashi's case became public after the government recently recognized her suicide as "karoshi." 
 
 "I'm on duty again Saturday-Sunday. I just want to die," she tweeted in November 2015. By December she was getting only two hours of sleep a day. 
 
 Asked during parliamentary questioning about Takahashi's death, the third officially acknowledged case of "karoshi" at Dentsu, Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare Yasuhisa Shiozaki threatened harsh action against the company, which dominates advertising for both companies and the government. 
 
 "It is extremely regrettable that the lesson was not learned and yet another young employee ended up committing suicide at the same company because of long working hours," he said. 
 
 There is growing recognition that efforts to curb overwork are failing and that the pressure increasingly is affecting younger workers, said Emiko Teranishi, who founded a group for karoshi victims' families after her husband, a chef, died of overwork. 
 
 A survey of 10,000 companies published in Japan's first white paper on karoshi, released this month, found that overtime at more than 20 percent exceeded the 80 hour per month threshold for overwork. 
 
 In 2015 alone, 93 suicides and attempted suicides were officially recognized as overwork deaths and eligible for compensation and 96 deaths from heart attacks, strokes and other illnesses were linked to overwork, it said. It listed 1,515 cases of workers or families seeking compensation for overwork-related mental problems. 
 
 More than half of Japanese workers give up taking paid vacations, while more than one in five Japanese work an average of 49 hours or longer each week, compared to 16.4 percent in the U.S., 12.5 percent in Britain and 10.1 percent in Germany. 
 
 Many Japanese karoshi victims were men in their 30s and 40s in managerial positions entailing no legal limits on overtime. 
 
 That includes a 40-year-old nuclear engineer at Kansai Electric Power in Tsuruga, western Japan, who hanged himself in April. Regulators found he had logged up to 200 hours of overtime a month. 
 
 Highlighting another lapse in oversight, workers in Japan's vocational training programs for foreign workers are among the most vulnerable. 
 
 A 27-year-old Philippine man, Joey Tocnang, died of heart failure in April 2014 while participating in a government-sponsored training program at a die-casting factory in central Japan's Gifu prefecture. His monthly overtime exceeding 120 hours was recognized as the cause of his death just months before he was due to finish the three-year program. 
 
 Growing official recognition seems not to have altered the tendency for long hours to trump work-life balance. 
 
 Dentsu's taxing regime has persisted since the lean years just after World War II, when then-company president Hideo Yoshida, dubbed the "demon of advertising" devised his "10 rules of work." 
 
 At the top of the list: "Create work for yourself; don't wait for work to be assigned to you." Another says, "Never give up, even if you might be killed." 
 
 A landmark Supreme Court decision in 2003 recognized the 1991 suicide of a 24-year-old Dentsu radio advertising worker as karoshi. A 30-year-old Dentsu employee who died of illness three years ago also was recognized as an overwork victim. 
 
 "Someone tell me why my daughter had to die," Takahashi's mother Yukimi said after winning an undisclosed amount of compensation for her daughter, whose name means "Festival." 
 
 "I wish someone had taken steps sooner when she was still alive." 
 
 ___ 
 
 Follow Mari Yamaguchi at https://www.twitter.com/mariyamaguchi 
 
 Find her work also at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/mari-yamaguchi 

 President of Dentsu to step down a year after Matsuri Takahashi killed herself, sparking calls for Japan to overhaul work culture 
 
 The head of Japan’s biggest advertising agency is to resign, as prosecutors launch an investigation into his firm for enforcing excessive overtime after an overworked employee took her own life. 
 
 
 
 Tadashi Ishii, the president of Dentsu, said he would step down next month, just over a year after Matsuri Takahashi killed herself at a company dormitory in a case Japanese authorities classified as karoshi, or death from overwork. 
 
 “Excessive amounts of work is something that should never be allowed to happen,” Ishii told reporters. “I deeply regret and feel responsible for this. I will take full responsibility and resign as president at January’s board meeting.” 
 
 Ishii said he regretted his failure to tackle the company work practices that led to Takahashi’s death, eight months after joining Dentsu in April 2015. “We deeply regret failing to prevent the overwork of our new recruit. I offer my sincere apologies,” he said. 
 
 Takahashi, 24, had worked more than 100 hours of overtime a month leading up to her death. In September, a labour standards inspection office in Tokyo said she had been driven to kill herself due to stress brought on by long working hours. 
 
 Japan has spent years struggling to address karoshi. About 2,000 people a year kill themselves due to work-related stress, according to the government, while other victims die from heart attacks, strokes and other conditions brought on by spending too much time at work. 
 
 Death from overwork: Japan's 'karoshi' culture blamed for young man's heart failure Read more 
 
 Weeks before she died on Christmas Day 2015, Takahashi posted on social media: “I want to die.” Another message read: “I’m physically and mentally shattered.” 
 
 Her death prompted calls for Japan to overhaul its work culture, which often forces employees to put in long hours of overtime as a demonstration of corporate loyalty. 
 
 Dentsu’s notoriously demanding work practices have long been the target of criticism and it was raided by regulators last month amid suspicions that it had broken labour standards law. 
 
 On Wednesday, the labour ministry referred the company and an unnamed Dentsu executive to prosecutors on suspicion of driving Takahashi to kill herself. 
 
 In response to criticism that it was doing too little to curtail excessive overtime, the firm started turning off the lights at 10pm at its Tokyo headquarters to encourage employees to go home. 
 
 In its first white paper on karoshi in October, Japan’s government said one in five workers were at risk of death from overwork. The paper found that despite attempts by some companies to establish a better work-life balance, Japanese workers still spend much longer hours in the office than their peers in other countries. 
 
 According to the paper, 22.7% of companies polled between December 2015 and January 2016 said some of their employees logged more than 80 hours of overtime each month – the official threshold at which the prospect of death from work becomes serious. 
 
 Japanese media said any overhaul of work practices should apply across the board. “The problem is not with Dentsu alone,” the Asahi Shimbun said in a recent editorial. The paper, which itself received a government warning about overtime this month, acknowledged that changing attitudes would be difficult but was essential as it affected employee morale and productivity. 
 
 Last week, on the first anniversary of her daughter’s death, Takahashi’s mother, Yukimi, said she hoped to “change the consciousness of every working person in Japan”. 
 
 Ichiro Oshima, a 24-year-old Dentsu employee, killed himself in 1991 in Japan’s first recognised case of karoshi-related suicide. Oshima had not had a day off for 17 months and was sleeping for less than two hours a night before his death. 
 
 In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here
– "It's 4am. My body's trembling. I'm going to die." That was reportedly one of Matsuri Takahashi's tweets not long before she killed herself last year by leaping from a dorm at Dentsu, the ad company where the 24-year-old worked, per the New York Times. This week, Dentsu's head quit, taking responsibility for Takahashi's suicide and his firm's culture of overwork. That culture is prevalent throughout Japan, and even has its own term, "karoshi," or "death from overwork." Tadashi Ishii offered his "heartfelt apology" Wednesday and said he'd offer his resignation to Dentsu's board in January; he apologized to Takahashi's family in person on Sunday, per the Japan Times. A labor department probe found Takahashi had been putting in more than 100 hours of overtime a month leading up to her death, and she'd noted on Twitter and to family that her bosses had harassed her and made sexist remarks. Per the AP, an October survey in the country's first white paper on karoshi found 93 suicides or attempted suicides in 2015 tied to overwork (the Guardian says that number is more like 2,000 suicides a year), with 96 deaths from heart attacks, strokes, and other maladies linked to karoshi. Business Insider reports Japan "has been trying desperately" to tamp down this deeply ingrained work ethic, including a "work style reform" panel led by PM Shinzo Abe. Some firms have started encouraging more work-life balance, including Dentsu, which has a reputation as being particularly hard-core (a slogan dating to the '50s implored workers to do their job "even if it kills you"). Now Dentsu flicks the lights off at 10pm and makes workers take a minimum of five days off every six months. "[I want to] change the consciousness of every working person in Japan," Takahashi's mom says, per the Guardian. (A deeper look at karoshi.)