| Turkish said: The social fabric of Japan is indeed the problem. There are many posts here saying how taking vacations is being frowned upon and overworking being a problem, so much so there are people dying from too much work, they have a term called Karoshi for it. |
I agree with most of what you said (especially about the incredible pressure a working mother get - first hand experience) but I disagree on this one for the linguistic part. It annoys me a little bit, because that's the kind of misunderstanding going from a news to another, and becoming false fact.
Compared to English or French, the Japanese language uses less expressions and grammar, and much more words. These words are mostly formed by picking English words or assembling chinese characters together, for example taking 2 or 3 characters, mixing them, and thus creating a lot of new words, words that cover meanings we would use grammar and a few words to convey. Karoshi is just 過労死, the first caracter means excess, the second work, and the last death. That's not a brand new word, that's chinese caracters assemblated, and it takes about as much effort to create and remember than to say ""people dying from too much work". You add a bit of grammar in English, and this "word" tells literally "people dying from too much work". That's just the way Japanese language works. For example, there are a word to say "inside a car", "go back to your company", "non smoking place" or "nose bleeding". That does not means Japanese spend more time in a car, or suffer more from nose bleeding.
But indeed, karoshi is a problem in Japan.
