The suicide of a stressed out, overworked 24-year-old Dentsu Inc. employee last year is not an isolated case. Labor authorities that raided the Tokyo headquarters and three regional offices of the nation's top advertisement agency this week reportedly suspect that the firm has made a number of other employees work overtime beyond the limits agreed on with its labor union. The repeated problems at a leading company like Dentsu — which had in fact been recognized by the government as a firm taking proactive steps to reduce overtime work — show that addressing the overworking of Japanese corporate employees cannot be left to the voluntary efforts of businesses but require legal measures.

The case of Matsuri Takahashi, who jumped to her death from her condominium in December 2015 after suffering from depression, was recognized by the labor inspection office as a result of overwork just as the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is pushing to cut the chronically long working hours of the nation's company workers as part of his "work-style reforms." Karoshi, or death from overwork, has remained a serious problem since it was first highlighted as a social issue in the late 1980s. In fact, the suicide of another overworked Dentsu employee in 1991 led to a judicial standard recognizing employers' responsibility for the overwork-induced suicides of their workers. It has also surfaced that the death of a young employee at the firm's Tokyo head office in 2013 was given compensation under labor accident insurance program as a result of overwork-induced illness.

That Takahashi killed herself just a few months after Dentsu had been urged by labor offices to correct its practices of having its employees illegally work more overtime hours than allowed under the firm's labor-management accord says a lot about the steps taken by the company to manage the health of its workers, as well as the effectiveness of government efforts to stop the overwork of corporate employees. Labor authorities have determined that Takahashi worked 105 hours of overtime over a month before she developed symptoms of depression, but records kept by the company showed that the overtime she reported that month was just barely within the maximum 70 hours under the labor-management agreement. Her family claims that she had been told by the company to underreport the overtime hours to keep them within the limit.