‘I was stressed at work, so I set the store on fire’: Burned-out Japanese part-time worker arrested for arson

A stressed-out part-time Japanese employee was arrested for arson after setting fire to the store he worked at last week.

Tatsuya Matsuzawa, a 32-year-old part-time worker, was arrested for burning down Ken Depot Soka Sezaki Store in Soka, Saitama Prefecture, on June 13.

Speaking to authorities, Matsuzawa, who had been working as a delivery and security man for the building materials store for about a year, admitted his crime.

“I was too stressed at work, so I set the store on fire,” he told investigators.

Several customers and over a dozen employees, including Matsuzawa, were reportedly inside the store when the crime was committed. A 42-year-old employee was injured during the fire and was taken to the hospital.

Overworking is an ongoing issue that Japanese employees have been facing for several decades now, and the term “karoshi,” which means “death by overwork,” was coined in Japan in the 1970s.

A 2013 incident which made headlines in 2017 involved Miwa Sado, a 31-year-old journalist who was found dead in her bed due to heart failure. Labor inspectors discovered during an investigation that Sado clocked in 159 hours of overtime and only took two days off in a single month.

An herbal liqueur company poll from 2017 revealed that one out of four Japanese women have fallen asleep while on a date mainly due to being overworked.

A year before that, the Japanese labor ministry revealed that it had documented 189 cases of employees dying from karoshi.

Featured Image via ANNnewsCH

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