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TOKYO, JAPAN - A JAPANESE woman hit out at corporate bosses this week, after her restaurant manager son died of a brain haemorrhage having done 200 hours of overtime in a month.
The case is the latest of hundreds of deaths a year officially determined to have been caused by the hardships of working for Japanese companies, where overtime is a matter of course and holidays few and far between.
Takayuki Maezawa, who died at the age of 32 last October, was the second employee at unlisted restaurant chain Skylark Co Ltd to die from overwork in the last four years, a union official in Tokyo said.
'My son was an extremely responsible person, who could never refuse if asked to do something,' the Asahi Shimbun quoted his 59-year-old mother as telling a news conference on Thursday.
'The company used him. None of his superiors worried about his health.' She called on bereaved families to speak out to try to prevent further cases, the Nikkei financial daily said.
Newspaper pictures showed Maezawa's sister weeping as she held a photograph of him.
Maezawa, who had been working at Skylark since 1991, usually left home around 7:00 a.m. and came back around 2:00 a.m., taking only two or three days off each month, said Mr Mitsuteru Suda of the National Union of General Workers Tokyo Tobu.
'We've been asking for improvement in their operations, but this case shows that the company has yet to show signs of remorse,' Mr Suda said.
An official at the Saitama branch of the labour ministry said they determined in June that Maezawa died from overwork, but declined to comment further, citing privacy concerns.
'We accept the decision seriously and want to try harder to oversee our operations,' Mr Shunichi Ito, a spokesman for Skylark, said.
Death from overwork, known as 'karoshi", has long been a serious issue in Japan, where an average worker uses less than 50 per cent of paid holidays, according to government data.
Late last year, a district court ruled in favour of the widow of a Toyota Motor Corp employee who said overwork had caused the death of her 30-year-old husband, who logged more than 106 hours of overtime in his final month at one of the carmaker's plants.
In the year to March 2008, the labour ministry determined 142 people died from overwork. -- REUTERS
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