April 2, 2021

A labor supervision authority in Kanagawa’s Kawasaki City acknowledged that the suicide of a 30-year-old male systems engineer at a Toshiba subsidiary as work-related caused by excessively long working hours, Akahata learned on March 31.

According to Akahata, the man, Abe Shinha, in 2015 entered the Kawasaki-based Toshiba subsidiary, Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation, as a systems engineer. In June 2019, he became a member of a project to develop a data system regarding nursing-care services which the company contracted for with the Welfare and Health Ministry. In the project, his job was to respond to the ministry’s demands on the system development. Five months later, he committed suicide.

The Kawasaki Minami Labor Standards Inspection Office recognized that Abe worked 103 hours of overtime, exceeding the government-set danger line for death from overwork (karoshi), during the one month before his death and developed severe depression.

Abe’s mother said, “I want the ministry to implement strict measures to protect workers from karoshi.”