A political journalist in Japan has died from overwork, her employer has revealed four years after her death, Business Insider (BI) has reported.
Citing Asahi newspaper, BI said , the Japanese national broadcaster NHK has announced that its employee, Miwa Sado succumbed to a congestive heart failure in 2013 after working 159 hours and 37 minutes of overtime in a month or an average of about 5.9 hours of overtime a day, including weekends.
According to a local labor office in Tokyo, the reporter’s cause of death was “karoshi” — a Japanese word that literally means “death from overwork,” BI reported.
The 31-year-old had been covering two elections — one regional, one national — in the month leading up to her death on July 24, 2013. She was found collapsed in her bed, holding a mobile phone, Asahi said.
A month before her death, Sado had emailed her father: “I am too busy and stressed out and think about quitting my job at least once a day, but I guess I have to hang on.”
NHK said it waited four years before disclosing Sado’s cause of death because her parents originally wanted it to be kept private. They changed their mind this summer, the national broadcaster told Asahi. (Photo: ANN News/YouTube)
