The desire to deck someone is particularly unacceptable in Japan, where people are trained from childhood to suppress anger so as to preserve social harmony. Instead, he says, he drinks nearly every night and gets a massage as often as he can afford. Stress has become topic No. Aides said Obuchi, 62, probably took no more than three days off in his 20 months in office. The belief here is that he was felled by the national malady: stress and fatigue due to overwork.
They blame unspoken yet tenacious attitudes: that any man worth his salt should work without complaint until he drops; that to sleep any more than absolutely necessary is self-indulgent; that stress is a kind of status symbol because it proves how busy, how in-demand, how indispensable the sufferer is; and that vacations are for students, slackers or also-rans.
Hirokazu Monou, head of the department of behavioral medicine at Fukushima Rosai Hospital in northeastern Japan. Monou reports a sharp rise since in the number of patients suffering from depression due to overwork, anxiety or exhaustion.
Monou believes that even more than overwork, it is suppressed anger--including rage at the corporate restructuring that is shaking so many midcareer men--that causes serious illness. In public, Obuchi was the ever-genial, unflappable, self-effacing embodiment of a nation that sees displays of anger as childish and self-destructive. The day before Obuchi collapsed, he turned the tables and kicked out Ozawa. Whether due to anger, anxiety or fatigue, depression appears to be increasing in Japan, experts say.
Of the 31, suicides in , police attributed 1, to work-related problems--nearly double the number in In eastern Japan alone, people jumped to their deaths in front of trains in , the national railway reported. Amid such general gloom, Japanese also took less vacation time in , the last year for which such official statistics are available.
