Karōshi (過労死, Japanese): death from overwork. Literally “excess-labour-death”. A heart attack or a stroke after months of endless overtime.
The first recognised case was in 1969: a 29-year-old in a newspaper’s shipping department, dead of a stroke. Today Japan has an official “karōshi line”: more than 80 hours of overtime a month, and your health is officially at risk. A law to prevent it only arrived in 2014, and there’s a sibling word, karōjisatsu, for suicide from overwork. The case that shook the country was Matsuri Takahashi, a 24-year-old in her first year at the ad agency Dentsu, with over 100 hours of monthly overtime, in 2015.
A country with an official threshold for being worked to death.
It’s the dark end of Ganbaru: keep going, don’t complain… until you can’t. See also Salaryman and Estupor y temblores.