> The initiative is timely. Japan has long grappled with a grim — and in some cases, fatal — culture of overwork. The problem is so severe, the country has even coined a term for it: karoshi means death by overwork from stress-induced illnesses or severe depression.<p>I love the ignorant CNN contributors there. You can really see the full effect of people commenting about cultures they do not know or do not understand.<p>First, 'overwork' is not what you think. Most of work done in Japanese companies is not busy work. Long hours are often the result of excessive bureaucracy and long meetings, and the expectation that you'll go out for dinner (maybe not everyday, but regularly enough) with your peers as a form of social bonding at the end of the day (something that is not really a thing in other cultures). If you don't understand that aspect of the culture, well you don't understand anything at all really.<p>As for coining words. Japanese people have a coin word for everything under the sun, even mundane things that foreigners would have no expression for. It's a culture that loves making new words, new expressions, new acronyms - very much in the DNA of the Japanese language, so there's no "even coined a term for X" that remotely means anything at all. Niche phenomena also coined specific words, and it does not mean there's a massive trend going on.<p>You should be a lot more concerned by the number of suicides in Japan than by the number of people dying from overwork - it's not even on the same scale at all.