In one of the last notes in his diary, the Japanese professor Yoshio Kudo lamented working hours that started early and could last until almost midnight. Two months later, he suffered a “karoshi”, a death from overwork.
Kudo’s grueling schedule is no exception in Japan, where teachers have some of the longest working hours in the world, packed with tasks ranging from cleaning to supervising transfers from school to extracurricular activities.
An OECD study in 2018 revealed that a middle school teacher in Japan works 56 hours a week, against an average of 38 hours in most developed countries.
But the figure does not even include the surprising amount of overtime.
Research by a union-linked think tank showed that teachers work an average of 123 hours of overtime a month, pushing their workload beyond the so-called “karoshi line” of 80 hours.
Teachers say they are reaching the limit and some have rebelled against this culture through lawsuits. Earlier this year, the Japanese ruling party commissioned a working group to study the issue.
For Kudo it comes too late. This middle school teacher died of a brain hemorrhage in 2007, aged just 40.
At his funeral, his shocked students told his wife Sachiko that the lively physical education teacher was “the furthest person from death imaginable.”
“He just loved working with children,” Sachiko, 55, told AFP.
But in his last weeks he suffered with the days. “Towards the end, he told me that the teachers had to stop working like this and that he wanted to lead that change in the future,” says the widow.
– ‘Goodbye weekends’ –
The Japanese authorities have ordered improvements such as outsourcing and digitalization of some tasks.
“Our measures to reform teachers’ working conditions are making steady progress,” Education Minister Keiko Nagaoka told Parliament in October.
She admitted that many “continue to work long hours” and “these efforts need to be accelerated.”
Data from the ministry shows a gradual decline in overtime, but experts don’t see many fundamental changes.
From piles of paperwork to distributing meals, cleaning or supervising the transfer of children to school, Japanese teachers “became in some way valets for everything,” says school management consultant Masatoshi Senoo.
“What should really be the responsibility of parents falls to teachers, who may even be sent to apologize to neighbors when students misbehave in parks or in stores,” he explains.
One of the most exhausting tasks is supervising sports and cultural activities in student clubs, usually held after school or on weekends.
“Being assigned as a supervisor for one of these clubs usually means saying goodbye to your weekends,” says Takeshi Nishimoto, a history teacher at a high school in Osaka.
In June, the 34-year-old teacher won a lawsuit seeking compensation for the stress caused by being overworked.
He filed the suit after coming close to a nervous breakdown in 2017, when he was a rugby club supervisor who worked 144 overtime hours in a single month.
– ‘Sacred work’ –
Experts say teachers are particularly vulnerable to overwork because of a decades-old law that prevents them from charging overtime.
In return, the law adds the payment of eight hours of overtime per month to their monthly salaries, a system that Nishimoto says results in “making teachers work without limits for a fixed payment.”
Masako Shimonomura, a physical education teacher in Tokyo, explains that it’s hard to really take a break during the day.
“It’s not all black in this job, though,” she adds.
“There are some moments I live for, like seeing the students in my softball club shine and smile at tournaments,” says the 56-year-old, who fears this pessimistic image will be imposed on young people.
A 2016 Mainichi newspaper investigation indicated that in the past decade 63 teacher deaths were classified as due to overwork.
But it took Kudo’s widow five years for “karoshi” to be officially recognized as the cause of her husband’s death.
For her, as teaching is seen as a “sacred work” dedicated to children, attitudes such as writing down overtime are considered selfish.
“So many teachers regret having lived their lives without stopping to enjoy the growth of their own children,” says the woman, a former teacher who now heads an anti-karoshi group.
“I feel like my husband and I are working together to follow through on his last words: that he wants to change the working practices of teachers.”