Karoshi of Love: Job Satisfaction Exploitation and “Women’s Work” in Japan

Life, work, and the karoshi line
A recent case of bakers working karoshi (death by overwork) hours leads our author to see ties between labor exploitation and "woman's work".

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On 3rd November 2021, a term trended on Japanese Twitter: yarigai sakushu (やりがい搾取) – “job satisfaction exploitation”. The term joins its close cousin – karoshi (過労死), or “working to death” – in the Japanese economic exploitation lexicon. It’s appearance on Twitter came about after newspapers reported that the employees at a popular cake shop been consistently working more than 100 hours of overtime a month.

Hyogo cake shop Patissier es koyama is famous for its fluffy “Koyama roll” roll cakes. This was the second time that authorities had warned the shop for employee overtime practices that violated Japan’s Labor Standards Act.

Christmas Cake and the karoshi Line

Labor officials handed Patissier es koyama its first warning back in January 2018 when authorities found that 55 out of the 100 workers had worked more than 100 hours of monthly overtime. This line is significant because labor authorities deem it the “karoshi line”. A job-related death (such as suicide) becomes “death by overwork” if the employee works over 100 hours of overtime in the month preceding their death. (For more information, see UJ’s write-up on the tragic case of Dentsu employee Takahashi Matsuri.)

A second inspection in January 2021 found that 48 out of 100 workers had exceeded the 100 hours karoshi threshold of overtime. This suggested that, rather than implementing correctives, Patissier es koyama had normalized long hours in the cake-making backroom.

According to Yomiuri Shimbun, employee LINE group-chats show that, in the run-up to Christmas 2020, some es koyama cake-makers had been working 17 hour shifts from 4am to 9pm. Several had also been clocking even 200 or 300 hours of overtime in a month. The company is now in the midst of processing compensation for the undertaken overtime. And owner pâtissier Koyama Shin has publicly apologized.

What enabled this was the cutthroat culture of the cake-shop world (a phrase I wish I didn’t need to write but this is the world we live in). Employers constantly remind employees they are in an industry that’s the stuff of society’s sweetest dreams. As such, there would always be plenty of dreaming candidates to replace the dissatisfied if they left. As an es koyama employee told the Yomiuri Shimbun, “Young patissiers are treated like they’re disposable, and they leave one after the other….Everyone was exhausted, but there was this general mood that said, ‘If you don’t like it, you can just leave.’ So no one felt like they could raise their voice about it.”

Sweet Dreams Are Made for Karoshi

The karoshi (overwork) line
Picture: タカス / PIXTA(ピクスタ)

First coined in 2007 by Japanese sociologist Honda Yuki, yarigai sakushu literally means an “exploitation of an activity that someone finds worth in doing.” Broadly speaking, it’s “job satisfaction exploitation” with a touch of Kondo Mari’s spark of joy. Since 2016, it’s trended on Twitter five times.

In the Korean working culture, it has a twin in the internet phrase “passion pay”. Both describe the same social phenomenon of worker abuse. The “passion” or “joy” you reap from your work “balances out” the long hours and low income.

Who needs food and rest when you can get through a shift through the power of love and dreams? Advance, passionate youth! No pain, no gain!

Most people know about the infamous long hours, low income, and irregular working lives of the animators and mangakas behind some popular franchises. Some might argue that the current Japanese animation industry not only runs on yarigai sakushu but relies upon it to achieve what it does. Net magazine Romsearch also identifies modeling and idol talent industry workers as vulnerable to yarigai sakushu. But aside from these are typical “dream” jobs where the glitz and glam of the final product hide the grime of reality, experts also describe social workers, carers, nurses, and educators as vulnerable to this phenomenon.

In this latter group, society and employers tell workers to expect to find a virtuous worthiness in their labor. Their self-sacrificing service of kindness is its own reward. “These people should be thankful,” the rest of society seems to say. “They have a job with a defined and recognizable worth. The work is its own reward”.

The Corollary to “Women’s Work”

Societal expectations are that a good nurse or carer should consider the joy in self-sacrifice a suitable enough reward. If they don’t…well, maybe they shouldn’t be a nurse at all.

Hmmm. Where else have we heard these arguments that the quiet joy in personal self-sacrifice should be enough reward for workers’ unpaid labor?

I’m thinking: housewives. Stay-at-home mothers. The women expected to care for their in-laws in their later years.

And this is where I’d like to draw attention to a dimension of the yarigai sakushu discussions that the media hasn’t addressed. And that’s the gendered aspect of it. The es koyama case has, momentarily, triggered some pontificating of the working conditions of people in these “dream and passion” industries. However, why is there a seeming overlap between yarigai sakushu industries and those that society considers (irrespective of the reality of who is actually baking and rolling the cakes) feminine realms?

Female and Feminized Industries

In 2018 in Japan, of 1,683,023 nurses, only 118,284 were male. That’s a 93% female force. 2020 figures from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare show that of 1665549 registered childcare workers, 82330 were male. Again, at around 95% female, women dominate this industry. As for music talent, if I search the term aidoru (アイドル) in Google Images, the first page returns a sea of carefully constructed femininity.

Cake-making is somewhat different: men have typically dominated the industry. Bunshun Online notes that of the top 20 most popular patisseries in Tokyo as ranked on TabeLog in February 2021, women only lead three.

The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare careers website also describes how workers in western-style confectionery are mostly male. However, it also notes that the sector is now seeing a rise in the number of female workers. The Bunshun backs this up in citing a 3:7 gender ratio of men to women at patisserie schools. Women are entering the industry, dreaming of crossing to the other side of the counter. This isn’t surprising given that cake selling, by and large, assumes a female customer base.

Sweet Femininity, Feminized Sweet-making

Passion karoshi: bakers in Japan and labor explotation
Picture: Fast&Slow / PIXTA(ピクスタ)

Typically in Japan people associate a sweet tooth with women and children. Conservative masculinity deems a male liking for sweet things as embarrassing, even shameful. The term suītsu danshi (スイーツ男子) or “Dessert Boys” is a thing in popular discourse for a reason: The idea of men openly enjoying fussily crafted whipped cream and cake confections is novel and deviates from Showa-lingering masculinity norms.

We haven’t been told what the gender ratio of workers was at es koyama, but what we can gather from above is that, even if the industry is composed of a male majority, cake-making and consumption, in the popular imagination, is “feminine”.

Cake-making presents to outsiders as “feminine”.

And so yarigai sakushu is not just unsurprising – it’s totally expected. Femininity and the feminine continue to be associated with quiet, resilient self-sacrifice in a staunchly patriarchal economy – in other words, an economy that habitually economizes by underpaying and overworking women, and as the es koyama case shows, such an economy will penalise men in socially imagined “feminized” sectors.

What Do Girls Dream Of?

Cake shops joining the ranks of yarigai sakushu industries is especially notable given this year’s survey of primary schoolers’ dreams for the future.

Kuraray is an artificial leather company notable for making pleather for Japanese primary schoolers’ distinctive randoseru backpacks. Since 1999, they have conducted surveys on primary school children’s dream careers. This year, the most popular dream career for girls was “cake shop or bakery.” In fact, this was the reply of 26.7% of their 2000 girl sample, which was followed by the 6.4% who wanted to be a “Talent – singer – model”. “Cake shop or bakery” was also the most popular dream career for girls in 2020, and 2019, and 2018. It’s been that way for the past 23 years.

“Nurse” came in third. Between “Cake-shop”, “Idol” and “Nurse”, all top three dream careers of primary school girls are industries experts have labelled vulnerable to yarigai sakushu. “Teacher” appears at eighth. “Childcare worker” at tenth. As an aside, “Animator” ranks in at eleventh.

In the boys’ responses, for comparison, the top three were “Police officer”, “Sports professional”, and “Fireman – Rescue worker” (first, second and third respectively).

We could argue that athletes are just as vulnerable to exploitation in the name of passion as idols. Likewise, police and firemen are just as burdened with an expectation of self-sacrifice as nurses and carers. However, very few people will expect police and firemen to smile in the joy of their self-sacrifice. And police and firemen tend to be, on average, better paid.

You could very well say that police and firemen risk their lives and deserve every extra yen. But there is now extensive literature documenting worldwide how nurses and healthcare workers experience significantly more violence at the workplace than most other jobs. Many do, in fact, risk their lives on the daily.

Incidentally, “animator” ranked fifth in the boys’ survey. In animation’s case we can speculate that, just as some industries are “feminized”, others may be socially infantilised. After all, child labor was a well-used cost-cutting measure before it was outlawed. Is the low pay subconsciously justified as treating animation workers – often considered dreamers who failed to “grow out” of childish pursuits – with the same disposable disdain as child labor? That’s something to think about for another time.

Conclusion

Yarigai sakushu isn’t just an issue in Japan. Japan and Korea just got there early in putting words to a workplace phenomenon, giving people the tools to talk about it, and having the vocabulary to talk about specific workplace abuses has had some positive ramifications. The Japanese government has recently taken steps to reduce karoshi overall. Others have gone even further – such as in Osaka, where the local government forcefully turns off employee’s computers at 6:30pm to prevent overwork.

On the one hand, I’d rather that Japan’s vocab lists for workplace suffering didn’t get any longer. On the other, I like to think that the first step to killing the demon is to name it.

That goes for both yarigai sakushu and sexism.

The abuse of cake-makers at Patissier es koyama has made one thing clear. A culture that undervalues femininity and female culture will also penalize workers in “feminine”-appearing industries, and the penalty will take a form to familiar to any woman with the “traditional” values of a patriarchal society: Society will expect the workers to take little to no pay for long hours, working with a simple, dutiful joy, as if it isn’t work at all!

And if they don’t like it? Hey, they can always leave.

Another worker will take their place, just as another heir-popping uterus can be found.

In this way, society demands that workers swallow their own disposable, faceless interchangeability.

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