In revealing the reason behind Matsuri Takahashi’s death on Christmas Day last year, her family said she had killed herself after having worked up to 105 hours of overtime.
Her family and their lawyers held a press conference last Friday to make the announcement, referring to a report by the Mita Labor Standard Inspection Office, which was released on Sept 30.
Takahashi, who had worked for the Digital account division, was hired by Dentsu in April 2015 after having graduated from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Tokyo.
The last quarter of the year saw her workload increase drastically with the overtime that she worked for the period Oct 9 to Nov 7 coming up to 105 hours.
Asahi reported that Takahashi killed herself in a dormitory for Dentsu’s female employees on Dec 25, 2015. She had also reached out via social media to friends and colleagues in the days leading up to her death, sending disturbing messages, such as “I want to die”.
The official report from Mita stated that following the sharp increase in the volume of Takahashi’s workload, she suffered a mental breakdown due to the psychological burden of having to do so much work.
Takahashi was not the first employee to have died as a direct result from overwork in the global ad firm’s Tokyo office.
According to Asahi, in 1991, a young male employee committed suicide after having clocked in long working hours at the firm. His family later sued the firm and a Supreme Court ruling in 2000 laid the blame entirely on the company.
After the Supreme Court ruling in 2000, Dentsu said it would strictly monitor the working hours of employees. The ruling also paved the way for other courts to make the same judgment in similar cases.
Japan’s labour ministry had also released a white paper last Friday, on how to prevent deaths from overwork.
The report indicated that labour standards inspection offices around the country recorded 93 suicides or attempted suicides from overwork that had occurred last year.