A law aimed at preventing karoshi, or death from overwork, took effect this month as the first legislative action of its kind, but whether the largely symbolic step will result in effective measures to eliminate health-related deaths and suicides of overworked and stressed-out company workers depends on further efforts by officials, lawmakers and employers.

Long after the problem was widely recognized in the 1980s, we still have hundreds of cases of people dying or killing themselves each year after being subjected to excessive workload or psychological stress on the job. As required by the law, the government should start by exposing the gravity of the problem.

A few days after the law took effect Nov. 1, the Tokyo District Court ordered a restaurant chain operator to pay ¥57.9 million in damages to the family of a former manager of one of its outlets in Tokyo who hanged himself in 2010. The 24-year-old manager had worked an average of more than 190 hours of monthly overtime in the seven months prior to his death. Last month, the Kumamoto District Court ordered a local bank to pay ¥130 million in compensation to the family of a 40-year-old employee who committed suicide after suffering from depression that the court determined had been induced from overwork.