"Japanese woman 'dies from overwork' after logging 159 hours of overtime in a month", 5 Oct 2017

Miwa Sado, who worked at the [public] broadcaster [NHK]’s headquarters in Tokyo, logged 159 hours of overtime and took only two days off in the month leading up to her death from heart failure in July 2013…A labour standards office in Tokyo later attributed her death to karoshi (death from overwork) but her case was only made public by her former employer this week…

The announcement comes a year after a similar ruling over the death of a young employee at Dentsu advertising agency…The government proposes to cap monthly overtime at 100 hours and introduce penalties for companies that allow their employees to exceed the limit – measures that critics say still put workers at risk…

In its first white paper on karoshi last year, the government said one in five employees were at risk of death from overwork…

Masahiko Yamauchi, a senior official in NHK’s news department, conceded that Sado’s death reflected a “problem for our organisation as a whole, including the labour system"...Yamauchi said NHK had waited three years to make Sado’s death public out of respect for her family, according to Kyodo news.