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by level3 1948 days ago
This is definitely not true. Here's the 2020 report from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare:

https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/r2h-1-5.pdf

The leading reason for suicide is, by far, health problems. After that, you have economic/living situation, then domestic problems, then work-related problems ranking 4th.

Obviously, there could be overlap in some situations, but I think it's clear that "most" suicides do not stem from excessive work.

1 comments

The top health problem is mental health. I believe many of them came from the fact we should work to live.

https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/h28h-2-02.pdf

Unless you can point out where the statistics say that, your belief is just speculation. I've skimmed over the data and didn't see anything about attributing depression to work problems. (If you have other sources regarding this, please link them.)

Table 2-3 shows the breakdown of "health problems," and depression is at about 40%. Even if all of those were due to overwork, this is only 40% of the "health problems" category, which is not enough to support a claim that "most suicides come from excessive work." For sure, there may be many cases that do, but there are no clear numbers in that regard. Personally, I feel such claims only reinforce the typical stereotypes about Japan rather than try to understand the actual situation.

Really strange that it's purely due to health problems, because they have one of the best health systems I've ever seen.

I was thinking more on the root causes of those health problems, which might or might not be work related, that's just a belief of mine (that's why I provided no sources and wasn't very assertive)