What does 過労死 Karoshi mean?
Karoshi (過労死) is death from overwork, recognised by Japan's health ministry in 1987 and treated as an occupational condition for compensation purposes.
- Written
- 過労死 (karōshi)
- Literally
- 過労 (karou, excessive labour) with 死 (shi, death). Death from overwork, most often by stroke or heart attack attributed to sustained excessive hours.
- As slang
- Not slang. It is a legal and administrative term, used in compensation claims and in the language of labour policy.
- In anime
- Rarely a plot point, frequently the background condition. The salaryman who is never home is drawn from the same working culture the word describes.
Karoshi is death caused by overwork. The word exists in law and in insurance claims, which distinguishes it from most vocabulary on this site: this is not a cultural concept but an administrative category.
The characters
過 (ka) means excess, going beyond. 労 (rou) is labour. 死 (shi) is death. Excess labour death, with no metaphor anywhere in it.
What it formally covers
Japan's health ministry recognised the phenomenon in 1987 as a serious social problem, and the workers' compensation system treats deaths of this kind as occupational, which gives the term legal weight rather than rhetorical weight. A related term covers suicide attributed to overwork, handled under the same machinery.
The mechanism usually described is cardiovascular: strokes and heart attacks following sustained periods of extreme hours, where the working pattern is judged to have been causal rather than incidental.
Why the word had to be invented
Because a category was needed for compensation purposes. If a death is to be attributed to work, someone has to define the threshold, adjudicate the claim and record the outcome, and none of that is possible without a name.
English has no equivalent term, which is not evidence that the situation does not occur in English-speaking countries. It is evidence that those countries have not built the same administrative apparatus around it.
The framing to avoid
The word is often deployed abroad as a lurid detail about Japanese working culture, and it does describe something real about postwar working hours. It is also a term produced by people trying to fix the problem: campaigners, lawyers and bereaved families needed a word that would stand up in a claim.
Reading it as a symptom of national character misses that. A society that names a harm, recognises it officially and pays compensation for it is a society arguing with itself about the harm, which is the opposite of accepting it.
Why it belongs on a site about anime vocabulary
Because it explains a stock character. The father who is never home, the exhausted office worker asleep on the last train, the manager who cannot refuse a demand: these are not lazy shorthand, they are drawn from the working conditions this word was coined to describe, and reading them as exaggeration misreads what the fiction is depicting.
Quick answers
What does karoshi mean?
過労 (karou, excessive labour) with 死 (shi, death). Death from overwork, most often by stroke or heart attack attributed to sustained excessive hours.
Is karoshi an insult?
Not slang. It is a legal and administrative term, used in compensation claims and in the language of labour policy.
What does karoshi mean in anime?
Rarely a plot point, frequently the background condition. The salaryman who is never home is drawn from the same working culture the word describes.