Kirk Spitzer

USA TODAY

TOKYO — Matsuri Takahashi was just 24 years old and a graduate of prestigious Tokyo University when she leaped to her death from her company dormitory on Christmas Day last year.

Tokyo Labor Bureau investigators ruled her suicide karoshi — death by overwork.

The Labor Bureau announced on Oct. 7 that Takahashi had been required to work 100 hours or more of overtime per month for months on end at the prominent Dentsu advertising agency. She often got as little as two hours of sleep a night, rarely had a day off and was ordered by supervisors to report fewer hours than she actually worked.

It’s an all too familiar story in Japan, where employees at nearly one in four companies are at risk of dying from working too many hours, according to a government report issued last month.

But Takahashi’s case has struck a nerve in Japan, and could help hasten reforms that experts say are long overdue.

Last Friday, Labor Ministry inspectors swooped down on Dentsu’s gleaming headquarters in central Tokyo and other sites around Japan, searching for evidence of systemic overtime abuse or other labor violations.

This was not the first such case at Dentsu. The 1991 suicide of a 24-year-old worker at company headquarters in Tokyo was among the first to focus national attention on the problem of karoshi.

“There is definitely going to be an impact from this case,” said Naohiro Yashiro, an economist and professor of global business at Showa Women’s University in Tokyo. “Dentsu is a very big company and if these practices can continue to happen there, it means that it’s necessary to put (stronger) regulations in place.”

The Labor Ministry reports about 100 suicides per year due to karoshi — a number that Yashiro says represents “just the tip of the iceberg.”

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appointed an outside panel in September to recommend changes to Japan’s workplace environment, which includes excessive overtime.

A Cabinet Office report issued last month found that employees at 23% of Japanese companies worked 80 hours or more of overtime per month last year. That’s the threshold at which the risk of death from physical or psychological causes is significant, according to the report.

Japan’s Labor Standards Law currently mandates a 40-hour workweek and a maximum of 15 hours of weekly overtime. But the law effectively allows unlimited overtime if there is a written agreement between a company and its labor union (unions in Japan generally are organized at individual companies, rather than across industries or trades).

According to a 2013 Labor Ministry report, companies with 300 or more employees on average allow up to 96.1 hours of overtime per month. That works out to roughly four and a half hours of overtime per day, every day.

According to the Labor Ministry, Dentsu negotiated a maximum of 55 hours of overtime per month with its in-house labor union.

But investigators found that Takahashi, who worked in the company’s digital advertising division, had worked more than 100 hours of monthly overtime in the months preceding her death. Moreover, she had been instructed by supervisors to record no more than 70 hours of overtime per month, regardless of how much time she had actually worked.

Attorneys for Takahashi’s parents said she worked as many as 130 hours of overtime in a single month.

“My daughter was telling her friends and colleagues she would get only 10 hours of sleep in a single week, and the only thing she felt was just a desire to sleep. … Why did she have to die?” Takashi’s mother said in a television interview.

Dentsu released a statement saying the company could not comment directly on the Takahashi case, but it is “taking the suicide of an employee seriously.”

Dentsu, Japan’s largest advertising and public relations company, could be subject to criminal charges if investigators find evidence of systemic labor abuses, according to local news media.

Takahashi joined Dentsu in 2015 after graduating from Tokyo University, considered one of Japan’s top universities.

In the weeks leading up to her death, she had posted messages on social media accounts complaining of her crushing workload and indicating that she was considering suicide.

“Death,” she said in one message, “would be bliss.”