Do you feel overworked? Think you might be working yourself to death? In Japan, people really do, quite literally, work themselves to death (karōshi). In this lesson, we talk about the contributing factors in Japanese society that cause karōshi. It may seem unimaginable, but it’s a serious reality of the Japanese lifestyle.
If you’re studying for JLPT1 or JLPT2, you’ll need to know how to use naninani wo ii koto ni… suru, which is used to describe “taking advantage of a situation by underhanded means.” Also we’ll take a look at words useful for describing statistical relationships. These are must-know phrases if you plan to do business in Japanese (and subsequently work yourself to death, lol).
This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Upper Intermediate Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
9 Responses to “Upper Intermediate Lesson #19 - Karoushi - Working to Death 3”
JapanesePod101.com says:
May 16th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Mina-san, this is quite a serious topic, isn’t it?
Marvin says:
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:04 pm
I have just read an short article about it in my newspaper. A worker of Toyota died after he made 106 mostly unpaid hours of overtime in his last month (and thats just the amount the court recognized i guess) 
I hope its just the numbers of approved cases of karoushi that goes up, and not the actual amount of karoushi cases.
タネ says:
May 24th, 2008 at 12:13 am
Thank you for a most interesting lesson! 
I like the vocabulary related to statistics. I’m a researcher, so these vocabulary items will come in very handy! 
Alain says:
May 24th, 2008 at 12:20 am
In the vocabulary for statistics, all is in percent.
Is there no use of wari (一割 二割)?
And I only found this 2 forms in the dictionary: are sanwari, yonwari…used ?
Glenn says:
May 24th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Fantastic series so far. And so topical as well just read the Yomiuri this morning (Japanese version) and they were discussing this exact topic. Unfortunately for me I hadn’t studied this lesson until now and asked myself the exact same question 労働災害は何ですか。I took a guess while I was reading it and luckily I guessed right.
Here is a link to the article http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/national/news/20080523-OYT1T00659.htm
It seems that things are getting worse 
Leave a Reply
Subscription Information
Course Information
Technical Information
Feature List
Video Guides
Privacy Statement
Category: Upper Intermediate Lessons |
Grammar: statistical relationships, ~wo ii koto ni... suru | Function: describing statistics, describing things | Topic: business, death, dying, jobs, karōshi, work, working, workplace in Japan | Politeness Level: casual
Share This