When Stuart Nomimizu relocated from Birmingham, England, to Tokyo his friends and family in the UK started to worry. Not only did they rarely hear from him, but he seemed to always be at the office from early morning until very late at night. His working hours seemed so extreme, that they didn't always believe he was working as hard as he said.
To convince them, he documented one week of his life as a so-called "salaryman" in Tokyo's financial-services industry and posted it online so they could understand his new lifestyle.
The resulting video went viral on YouTube, racking up more than one million views. It depicts a hectic week in 2015 during the financial sector's busy season — from January to March — when Nomimizu clocked in 78 working hours and 35 sleeping hours between Monday and Saturday (before working another six hours that Sunday, which you don't see in the video).
[...] It got to the point where Nomimizu was putting in so many 80-hour work weeks that he fainted in his apartment one night and came-to right next to a TV stand, which he'd narrowly missed. When the rush period was finally over, he says the entire office got "horrendously sick."
While Nomimizu's excessive workload was somewhat temporary, he says "there are people working for companies in Tokyo that do that sort of workload and have that life day-in, day-out all year long." Indeed, marathon workdays are so entrenched in the culture that there's even a Japanese word, karoshi, that quite literally means "overwork death."
Source: If you want to earn more, work less
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday January 16 2017, @10:23PM
IANAD, but does medical residents actually do any of the critical work that can mean life/death of a patient? I thought they just do all the menial stuff... at least that's what I see when I go to the ER..
(Score: 2, Informative) by pipedwho on Tuesday January 17 2017, @12:05AM
They might only being doing 'menial stuff'. But if a well rested Doctor is relying on something to have been done properly by a overtired resident, it may have indirect life threatening repercussions (eg. improper labelling of a blood test sample, incorrect drug / quantity prepared for a patient, or even something as simple as recording observational data on the wrong patient's chart / the wrong data on the right patient's chart).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @12:39AM
> does(sic) medical residents actually do any of the critical work that can mean life/death of a patient?
Yes. Pipedwho is 100% correct to mention chart errors. Mistakes of documentation (or failing to read the chart/right chart) are one of the leading causes of bad hospital results (read: death un-needed complications).