Dying from Overwork: Disturbing Looks Inside Japan’s Karoshi and China’s “996” Work System

in Business, Economics, Health | June 2nd, 2022

By most mea­sures, Japan boasts the high­est life expectan­cy in the world. But that rank­ing, of course, does­n’t mean that every Japan­ese per­son sees old age. Though the coun­try’s rate of vio­lent crime is low enough to be the envy of most of the world, its sui­cide rate isn’t, and it says even more that the Japan­ese lan­guage has a word that refers specif­i­cal­ly to death by over­work. I first encoun­tered it near­ly thir­ty years ago in a Dil­bert com­ic strip. “In Japan, employ­ees occa­sion­al­ly work them­selves to death. It’s called karōshi,” says Dil­bert’s pointy-haired boss. “I don’t want that to hap­pen to any­body in my depart­ment. The trick is to take a break as soon as you see a bright light and hear dead rel­a­tives beck­on.”

You can see the phe­nom­e­non of karōshi exam­ined more seri­ous­ly in the short Now­ness video at the top of the post. In it, a series of Japan­ese salary­men (a Japan­ese Eng­lish term now well-known around the world) speak to the exhaust­ing and unceas­ing rig­ors of their every­day work sched­ules — and, in some cas­es, to the empti­ness of the homes that await them each night.

The CNBC seg­ment just above inves­ti­gates what can be done about such labor con­di­tions, which even in white-col­lar work­places con­tribute to the heart attacks, strokes, and oth­er imme­di­ate caus­es of deaths ulti­mate­ly ascribed to karōshi. In a grim irony, Japan has the low­est pro­duc­tiv­i­ty among the G7 nations: its peo­ple work hard, yet their com­pa­nies are hard­ly work­ing.

Ini­tia­tives to put a stop to the ill effects of over­work, up to and includ­ing karōshi, include manda­to­ry vaca­tion days and office lights that switch off auto­mat­i­cal­ly at 10:00 p.m. Among the lat­est is “Pre­mi­um Fri­day,” a pro­gram explained in the Vice video above. Devel­oped by Kei­dan­ren, Japan’s old­est busi­ness lob­by, it was ini­tial­ly received as “a direct response to karōshi,” but it has its ori­gins in mar­ket­ing. “We want­ed to cre­ate a nation­al event that bol­stered con­sump­tion,” says the direc­tor of Kei­dan­ren’s indus­tri­al pol­i­cy bureau. By that log­ic, it made good sense to let work­ers out ear­ly on Fri­days — let them out to shop. But Pre­mi­um Fri­day has yet to catch on in most Japan­ese enter­pris­es, aware as they are that Japan’s eco­nom­ic might no longer intim­i­dates the world.

The afore­men­tioned low pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, along with a rapid­ly aging and even con­tract­ing pop­u­la­tion, con­tributed to Japan’s loss of its posi­tion as the world’s sec­ond-largest econ­o­my. It was over­tak­en in 2011 by Chi­na, a coun­try with over­work prob­lems of its own. The Vice report above cov­ers the “996” sys­tem, which stands for work­ing from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m, six days a week. Preva­lent in Chi­nese tech com­pa­nies, it has been blamed for stress, ill­ness, and death among employ­ees. Laws lim­it­ing work­ing hours have thus far proven inef­fec­tive, or at least cir­cum­ventable. Cer­tain pun­dits nev­er stop insist­ing that the future is Chi­nese; if they’re right, all this ought to give pause to the work­ers of the world, East­ern and West­ern alike.

Relat­ed con­tent:

“Inemuri,” the Japan­ese Art of Tak­ing Pow­er Naps at Work, on the Sub­way, and Oth­er Pub­lic Places

Why 1999 Was the Year of Dystopi­an Office Movies: What The Matrix, Fight Club, Amer­i­can Beau­ty, Office Space & Being John Malkovich Shared in Com­mon

The Employ­ment: A Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion About Why We’re So Dis­en­chant­ed with Work Today

What is the Secret to Liv­ing a Long, Hap­py & Cre­ative­ly Ful­fill­ing Life?: Dis­cov­er the Japan­ese Con­cept of Iki­gai

Charles Bukows­ki Rails Against 9‑to‑5 Jobs in a Bru­tal­ly Hon­est Let­ter (1986)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The “All of Bach” Project Is Making Performances of Every Bach Piece Available Online: Watch 346 High-Quality Recordings

in Music | June 2nd, 2022

Grant­ed a wish to trav­el back in time, many a Bach lover would leap to Thuringia, in a pre-uni­fied Ger­many, cir­ca the ear­ly 1700s, or to Arn­stadt, Mühlhausen, the courts of Weimar and Köthen, or Leipzig. There, Bach com­posed his con­cer­tos, suites, fugues, pre­ludes, canons, chorales, organ works, solo pieces, as well as unique works like the Gold­berg Vari­a­tions and The Well-Tem­pered Clavier. He wrote prin­ci­pal­ly for church­es and sov­er­eigns who had his music per­formed in what we now call its orig­i­nal set­tings.

Of course, we can’t hear Bach’s Baroque mas­ter­works the way his con­tem­po­raries did, though we can try. But imag­ine stand­ing in St. Paul’s Church, hear­ing the com­pos­er play his organ works him­self in the ear­ly 1720s. (Built in 1231, the church sur­vived WWII, only to be demol­ished for rede­vel­op­ment under the East Ger­man regime in 1968.) Imag­ine hear­ing Bach’s cham­ber works played in the ornate cham­bers of the 18th cen­tu­ry. It’s a nice dream, but I think we’re for­tu­nate to live in his dis­tant future, and to have expe­ri­enced his music through three-hun­dred years of inter­pre­ta­tions, new arrange­ments and instru­men­ta­tion, and thou­sands of record­ings.

Bach might bare­ly rec­og­nize the way some of his works have been inter­pret­ed. He might object to beloved, yet unortho­dox record­ings by Glenn Gould and Wendy Car­los. He might abhor the notion of record­ing alto­geth­er. Who knows. But the music is no longer his. As Yo Yo Ma has tried to show in his life’s work, Bach belongs to every­one. The Nether­lands Bach Soci­ety shares this belief, and has endeav­ored to upload live per­for­mances of “All of Bach” to their web­site and YouTube. The oppor­tu­ni­ty to see Bach’s works per­formed live in Ams­ter­dam, view­able from any­where at any time, would seem like dev­il­ry to those in Bach’s day.

“Since the start of this unique project,” writes the Soci­ety, “more than 350 of the total of 1080 works by Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach have been per­formed and record­ed in spe­cial ways” in this attempt to “share Bach’s music with the whole world” through “excel­lent audio visu­al record­ings of the high­est qual­i­ty.” These per­for­mances include set­tings very like the orig­i­nals, if very far away in time: “Can­tatas are filmed in a church, for instance, and cham­ber music at the musi­cian’s homes.” They also include high­lights such as the Six Cel­lo Suites at the Rijksmu­se­um and Bran­den­burg Con­cert no. 4 at Felix Mari­tis.

See high­light­ed per­for­mances here and just above, watch new­ly-added (as of Feb­ru­ary) per­for­mances of The Well-Tem­pered Clavier, “48 key­board pieces in all 24 keys,” the Nether­lands Bach Soci­ety notes, “the sort of chal­lenge Bach enjoyed.” This is the com­pos­er at his freest — “In con­trast to the iron dis­ci­pline Bach had to apply to his church com­po­si­tions, here he could aban­don him­self to Intel­lec­tu­al Spiel­erei with­out wor­ry­ing about dead­lines.” Help the Nether­lands Bach Soci­ety con­tin­ue their ambi­tious project with a dona­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant.

Hear J.S. Bach’s Music Per­formed on the Laut­en­wer­ck, Bach’s Favorite Lost Baroque Instru­ment

Bach Played Beau­ti­ful­ly on the Baroque Lute, by Pre­em­i­nent Lutenist Evan­geli­na Mas­car­di

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Machiavelli’s The Prince Explained in an Illustrated Film

in Books, History, Politics | June 2nd, 2022

Nic­colò Machi­avel­li lived in a time before the inter­net, before radio and tele­vi­sion, before drones and weapons of mass destruc­tion. Thus one nat­u­ral­ly ques­tions the rel­e­vance of his polit­i­cal the­o­ries to the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. Yet in dis­cus­sions about the dynam­ics of pow­er, no name has endured as long as Machi­avel­li’s. His rep­u­ta­tion as a the­o­rist rests most­ly on his 1532 trea­tise Il Principe, or The Prince, in which he pio­neered a way of ana­lyz­ing pow­er as it was actu­al­ly wield­ed, not as peo­ple would have liked it to be. How, he asked, does a ruler — a prince — attain his posi­tion in a state, and even more impor­tant­ly, how does he main­tain it?

You can hear Machi­avel­li’s answers to these ques­tions explained, and see them illus­trat­ed, in the 43-minute video above. It breaks The Prince down into sev­en parts sum­ma­riz­ing as many of the book’s main points, includ­ing “Do not be neu­tral,” “Destroy, do not would,” and “Be feared.”

These com­mand­ments would seem to align with Machi­avel­li’s pop­u­lar image as an apol­o­gist, even an advo­cate, for bru­tal and repres­sive forms of rule. But his enter­prise has less to do with offer­ing advice than with describ­ing how real fig­ures of pow­er, princes and oth­er­wise, had amassed and retained that pow­er.

The video comes from Eudai­mo­nia, a Youtube chan­nel that has also fea­tured sim­i­lar­ly ani­mat­ed exege­ses of Sto­icism and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Its cre­ator makes these ancient sources of knowl­edge acces­si­ble with not just his car­toon­ish illus­tra­tions, but also his inclu­sion of illu­mi­nat­ing exam­ples from more recent his­to­ry. In the case of The Prince, these come from eras like the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, World War II, and even our own time of instant glob­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion, atten­tion-hun­gry media, and a seem­ing­ly weak polit­i­cal class. In much of the world, we live in a time much less nasty and brutish than Machi­avel­li’s. But look­ing at the effec­tive­ness (or lack there­of) of our own lead­ers, we have to admit that the prin­ci­ples of The Prince may not have gone out of effect.

To delve deep­er into the world of Machi­avel­li, you can watch a BBC doc­u­men­tary on the Renais­sance polit­i­cal the­o­rist below.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Does “Machi­avel­lian” Real­ly Mean?: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son

How Machi­avel­li Real­ly Thought We Should Use Pow­er: Two Ani­mat­ed Videos Pro­vide an Intro­duc­tion

Salman Rushdie: Machiavelli’s Bad Rap

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course

Allan Bloom’s Lec­tures on Machi­avel­li (Boston Col­lege, 1983)

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

 

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Discover the Dystopian Surrealist Art of Polish Painter & Photographer Zdzisław Beksiński

in Art | June 1st, 2022

“In the medieval tra­di­tion, Beksin­s­ki seems to believe art to be a fore­warn­ing about the fragili­ty of the flesh — what­ev­er plea­sures we know are doomed to per­ish — thus, his paint­ings man­age to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongo­ing strug­gle for life. They hold with­in them a secret poet­ry, stained with blood and rust.” — Guiller­mo del Toro

The life and death of Pol­ish painter, pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and sculp­tor Zdzisław Bek­sińs­ki has been sen­sa­tion­al­ized, made into a cursed tragedy in the telling of events late in his life that, tak­en togeth­er, all seem hor­ri­fy­ing enough: the death of the artist’s wife from can­cer in 1998, the sui­cide of his son, Tomasz, one year lat­er, and, final­ly, his own stab­bing death in 2005 at the hands of his care­tak­er’s teenage son. If we add to this account Bek­siński’s child­hood in Nazi-occu­pied, then Sovi­et-occu­pied Poland, we have ample rea­son to spec­u­late about the mean­ing of his night­mar­ish visions.

But the “Night­mare Artist,” as he’s called in the video above, wants us to stay away from mak­ing mean­ing of any kind. Unlike artists whose work can seem insep­a­ra­ble from their state­ments of pur­pose (or per­son­al or his­tor­i­cal tragedies), Bek­sińs­ki had noth­ing to say about his art or his life.

He pre­ferred that oth­ers keep silent as well, though he him­self hat­ed silence, work­ing to loud clas­si­cal music and rock. Music, he said — not lit­er­a­ture, film, his­to­ry, or even oth­er artists — was his only inspi­ra­tion. The impres­sion we get from these scant details and Bek­siński’s dis­turb­ing work, is of an indi­vid­ual prob­a­bly best left alone.

Judg­ing an artist’s body of work by the worst things that have hap­pened to them, how­ev­er, is man­i­fest­ly unfair. For the major­i­ty of his life, Bek­sińs­ki embod­ied the famous Flaubert quote about a reg­u­lar, order­ly cre­ative life. He stud­ied archi­tec­ture, went on to super­vise con­struc­tion projects and then design bus­es. Like many peo­ple, he hat­ed his job (he left the bus com­pa­ny in 1967). He devel­oped a pas­sion for pho­tog­ra­phy, sculp­ture, and paint­ing. With no for­mal art train­ing, he struck out on a suc­cess­ful fifty-year career as a pro­lif­ic Sur­re­al­ist, becom­ing a mas­ter of oil paint­ing. Was he tor­ment­ed? Those who knew him describe him as mild-man­nered, pleas­ant, even fun­ny. He seems to have been quite con­tent.

Do we resist inter­pre­ta­tion as Bek­sińs­ki want­ed? How can we, when the imagery of death in his work seems itself to inter­pret events that inevitably shaped his world? Bek­sińs­ki was born in Sanok, in south­ern Poland, in 1929. When the Nazis came to Poland a decade lat­er, Sanok’s pop­u­la­tion was “about 30% Jew­ish,” notes the Col­lec­tor, “near­ly all of which was elim­i­nat­ed by the war’s end.” Decades lat­er, Nazi iconog­ra­phy and crowds of gaunt, corpse-like fig­ures began to recur in Bek­siński’s paint­ings, which he described as “pho­tograph­ing dreams.” These hor­rors pre­dom­i­nate in his most pop­u­lar work, even though Bek­siński’s vision had more breadth than casu­al fans might know.

His sense of humor is evi­dent in his pho­tog­ra­phy, and in ear­ly, more abstract, paint­ings, he dis­plays a much lighter touch. (See a broad sam­pling of Bek­siński’s work at Art­net.) In the 90s, he began exper­i­ment­ing with com­put­er graph­ics and “was grant­ed his wish of being able to add sur­re­al­is­tic alter­ations to pho­tographs,” bring­ing his career “full cir­cle as he returned to his first medi­um,” notes Culture.pl. Yet, like his con­tem­po­rary H.R. Giger, where Bek­siński’s name is known, he’s usu­al­ly known as a painter of night­mares and heavy met­al album cov­ers — and for good rea­son.

The Sev­er­al Cir­cles video on Bek­sińs­ki above (which opens with a con­tent warn­ing) shows why his “epic uni­verse of hellscapes” has proven so inescapable to the crit­ics who embraced his work, the gal­lerists who sold it, and those who have dis­cov­ered it since the artist’s trag­ic death.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

The For­got­ten Women of Sur­re­al­ism: A Mag­i­cal, Short Ani­mat­ed Film

The Pol­ish Artist Stanisław Witkiewicz Made Por­traits While On Dif­fer­ent Psy­choac­tive Drugs, and Not­ed the Drugs on Each Paint­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How the Byzantine Empire Rose, Fell, and Created the Glorious Hagia Sophia: A History in Ten Animated Minutes

in Animation, Architecture, History | June 1st, 2022

If you only know one fact about the Roman Empire, it’s that it declined and fell. If you know anoth­er, it’s that the Roman Empire gave way to the Europe we know today — in the full­ness of time, at least. A good deal of his­to­ry lies between our twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry and the fall of Rome, which in any case would­n’t have seemed like such a deci­sive break when it hap­pened. “Most his­to­ry books will tell you that the Roman Empire fell in the fifth cen­tu­ry CE,” says the nar­ra­tor of the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above. “This would’ve come as a great sur­prise to the mil­lions of peo­ple who lived in the Roman Empire up through the Mid­dle Ages.”

This medieval Roman Empire, bet­ter known as the Byzan­tine Empire, began in the year 330. “That’s when Con­stan­tine, the first Chris­t­ian emper­or, moved the cap­i­tal of the Roman Empire to a new city called Con­stan­tino­ple, which he found­ed on the site of the ancient Greek city Byzan­tium.” Not only did Con­stan­tino­ple sur­vive the bar­bar­ian inva­sions of the Empire’s west­ern provinces, it remained the seat of pow­er for eleven cen­turies.

It thus remained a pre­serve of Roman civ­i­liza­tion, aston­ish­ing vis­i­tors with its art, archi­tec­ture, dress, law, and intel­lec­tu­al enter­pris­es. Alas, many of those glo­ries per­ished in the ear­ly thir­teenth cen­tu­ry, when the city was torched by the dis­grun­tled army of deposed ruler Alex­ios Ange­los.

Among the sur­viv­ing struc­tures was the jew­el in Con­stan­tino­ple’s crown Hagia Sophia, about which you can learn more about it in the Ted-ED les­son just above. The long con­ti­nu­ity of the holy build­ing’s loca­tion belies its own trou­bled his­to­ry: first built in the fourth cen­tu­ry, it was destroyed in a riot not long there­after, then rebuilt in 415 and destroyed again when more riots broke out in 532. But just five years lat­er, it was replaced by the Hagia Sophia we know today, which has since been a Byzan­tine Chris­t­ian cathe­dral, a Latin Catholic cathe­dral, a mosque, a muse­um (at the behest of sec­u­lar reformer Mustafa Kemal Atatürk), and most recently a mosque again. The Byzan­tine Empire may be long gone, but the end of the sto­ry told by Hagia Sophia is nowhere in sight.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Muse­um, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again

360 Degree Vir­tu­al Tours of the Hagia Sophia

Hear the Hagia Sophia’s Awe-Inspir­ing Acoustics Get Recre­at­ed with Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tions, and Let Your­self Get Trans­port­ed Back to the Mid­dle Ages

Hear the Sound of the Hagia Sophia Recre­at­ed in Authen­tic Byzan­tine Chant

French Illus­tra­tor Revives the Byzan­tine Empire with Mag­nif­i­cent­ly Detailed Draw­ings of Its Mon­u­ments & Build­ings: Hagia Sophia, Great Palace & More

Istan­bul Cap­tured in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Hagia Sophia, Top­ka­ki Palace’s Impe­r­i­al Gate & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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