Konno published a book in 2012, Evil Corporations: The Monsters Eating Up Japan, that used the phrase “Burakku Kigyo”—which loosely translates to “dark companies” or “evil corporations”—to describe firms that take advantage of workers in this way. That phrase has since become a buzzword in Japan. A group of journalists and labor advocates now issue a Burraku Kigyo of the Year award for the company that treats its workers the worst. (In 2015, Seven-Eleven Japan won the honors.) “It’s harder to find these jobs as a regular employee, and those places that are hiring, they have an advantage to exploit the workers as much as they can,” Konno said.

The result is that even Japan’s “good” jobs can be brutal. People who hold them may earn enough money to support families, but they often don’t have much time to date, or to do anything but work, sleep, and eat. Many are so stressed they can barely function. At POSSE, I met a young man named Jou Matsubara, who graduated from Rikkyo Daigaku, a prestigious private college in Japan. Matsubara, who comes from a working-class family, thought he’d achieved the Japanese dream when he graduated from college and got a job at Daiwa House Group, a Japanese home builder.

The company advertised itself as a great place to work, but Matsubara, who was a wrestler in college, told me it soon became evident that it was anything but. Though company employees left work at 7 p.m. on paper, Matsubara said he was required to work until late at night almost every day. Employees were required to sign off at 7 p.m., even if they were still working, and were given iPads so that they could do so even if they were out of the office at meetings. If they didn’t sign off, they’d get a call on their cellphones brusquely asking them to sign off immediately but keep working, he said. “The amount of time you're actually working and the amount of time that is recorded you're working have absolutely no relation to each other,” he said. Matsubara got almost no time off, and was required to take classes to receive real-estate certifications on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which were days he was told he’d have free. This lifestyle made dating impossible. The closest he got to women, he said, was when his boss would drag him to cabaret clubs, and then make him pick up the tab.

After a year, the long hours and stress started to affect his health. Matsubara had trouble sleeping, and started hearing voices. He fell into a depression, he said, because the experience he had expected from a regular job and his own experience were so different. Matsubara told me he was taken to the hospital multiple times in an ambulance because he couldn't breathe. Eventually, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He said the company forced him to resign, and then made him pay back the money he’d saved from living in a company dormitory. (Daiwa House did not return a request for comment.) Matsubara is now living on welfare. “My life that was going smoothly and systematically was destroyed by Daiwa House,” he said. He estimated that out of the 800 people who started with him at Daiwa House, 600 have quit.