The Japanese video game industry is world famous, contributing to the nation's standing
as the 3rd largest economy in the world.
But is something dark lurking beneath their perfect looking facade?
Japan has enjoyed success in steel, tech, science and automobiles.
Though one of their biggest exports comes by way of entertainment.
The video game industry has provided Japan with opportunities to ship their culture and
improve their image overseas.
In keeping with tradition, Japanese companies innovated on technology that was already in
use elsewhere.
Of course, with a little of their secret sauce, they were able to wildly succeed where others
were seeing massive failure.
(Game crash of 1983, Atari).
What was in that secret sauce, you might ask?
Well, it could be the fact that Japanese companies routinely work their employees to death.
That's actually not a metaphor, Japanese employees often work so many hours at the
office that they fall ill and die.
It's gotten so bad, and happened so often, that they had to add a new word to their language
to describe the phenomenon of death-by-work.
The word Karoshi gained traction in the 1980's and has become a regular in news headlines
ever since.
According to the National Defense Council for Victims of Karoshi, "more than 10,000
workers die from work related cardiovascular diseases each year", though admittedly the
number of official claims and court settlements is much lower.
But even that's only telling half the story.
Karoshi also encompasses those who commit sucide due to the mental exhaustion and endless
cycle of day-to-day work.
This is definitely a contributing factor to Japan's extremely high suicide rate.
NHK, Japan's largest news broadcaster, reports often on the changes that Japan needs to make
in order to avoid karoshi.
However, in October of 2017, little more than a week after publishing this (dentsu) article
decrying yet another karoshi victim, NHK revealed that in 2013 one of their own employees died
of karoshi after working 159 hours of overtime in a single month.
This problem runs incredibly deep.
So deep, in fact, that when companies try to amend their policies to help alleviate
the stress on their employees, they are met with resistance from traditionalists who take
the old adage "hard work is its own reward" a little too seriously.
It's not just the companies that are liable, it's the consumers as well.
To meet the demands of the consumers, companies drive their workers, and the government stands
by for the tax revenue.
Occasionally, when things get a little out of hand (i.e. people are dying), the government
or the consumers will blame the company and force the CEO to resign, but then it's right
back to business as usual.
It's easy to point the finger, it's harder to look in the mirror.
Are the corporations so greedy?
Or are the consumers, those desperate for the wants of their heart to be inexpensive
and readily available; the greedy ones?
It's a team effort, to be sure, but it's important to recognize that each step in this
process, the consumers, the corporations, the government, all bear a heavy portion of
the responsibility when workers livelihoods are diminished, and many are overworked to
the point of death.
In the video game industry, many current and former employees have spoken out about the
harsh treatment they received while developing some of your favorite games.
People like Keiji Inafune, designer and producer of the Megaman series at Capcom, Koichi Nakamura,
director of several Dragon Quest games at Enix, and many other developers talked about
how hard it was, and how much was required of them in order to finish what they were
working on.
Stories range from a tyrannical boss who was impossible to please, to employees regularly
going 3 or 4 days without sleep, even to programmers being locked inside of a room and not allowed
out until they had finished coding their project.
All in all, there is some seriously troubling history behind the development of some of
the most influential video games that have come out of Japan.
Josh Szczepaniak, author of "The untold History of Japanese Game Companies", has
compiled a list of video game employees who were forced to work under extreme circumstances
on a blog post for the website Gamasutra.
He discovered the use of what is referred to as the Hamachi, or "crunch room".
According to Tokihiro Naito, Developer of Hydlide: "When you entered the room, the door
was locked from the outside.
Sometimes we'd throw a programmer in there, lock the door, and say, 'We'll let you out
once you finish your coding!'"
Yasuo Yoshikawa of T&E Soft said: "I never went home for six months, working and sleeping
in the Hamachi room.
One Sunday I went home, took a bath, and went to sleep.
When I woke up I was blind.
I was terrified and someone took me to the hospital because I couldn't see anything!
The doctor said it was not a condition young people are supposed to get.
So I was ordered to take rest from work."
Turns out, most developers have a crunch room.
This is, of course, not to be confused with the isolation rooms I mentioned in my video
about the video game industries ties to the Yakuza.
Isolation rooms, like the ones used by SEGA, SONY, PANASONIC, HITACHI, TOSHIBA, and many
others, are essentially solitary confinement prison cells; empty rooms that employees would
be locked in for long periods of time either as punishment, or as a means to get them to
resign without severance benefits.
Some employees reported coming in to work every day for months straight and spending
the entire work-day in an isolation room.
After a hundred or so such days, most employees would become so disheartened and depressed
that they would give in and quit the company.
In 2016, the awful business practices of Konami came to light.
They began monitoring how much time employees were taking on lunch breaks and shaming those
who stayed out too long in public announcements.
The camera's in Konami's offices aren't meant for security, but to constantly monitor
the staff as they work.
Employee's email addresses are routinely changed to random letters and numbers every
few months.
When one employee leaves the company, Konami monitors their related social media posts
and reshuffles other employees who like or favorite them within the company.
People who aren't seen as useful get reassigned as janitors and factory workers, presumably
to get them to resign, similar to the function of an isolation room.
Konami is gaining a reputation as a Black Company.
Black Companies are well known in Japan for having a high rate of harassment, unpaid overtime,
extended work hours, discrimination and short-term employment contracts.
The government has posted a list of hundreds of black companies with the likes of Dentsu
and Panasonic topping it off.
These companies have become well known for their poor treatment of employees, and even
inspired the annual Black Corporation Awards.
One interesting side note is that the winner of that award for 2017 was actually 7-Eleven.
It appears as though even foreign companies, when moving into Japan, quickly adapt to the
local customs.
Black Companies, are, of course, not to be confused with Dark Companies like Hyde, who
have worked on games like the Final Fantasy, Yakuza and Persona series; yet have never
been credited for their work.
Some Japanese companies, in order to maintain the illusion that they themselves made the
entire game you're playing, will pay smaller companies upfront for work, but not offer
them any credit.
These smaller companies are considered Dark because they help make the games you enjoy
in the shadows, while others get all of the fame and accolades.
Some of these companies are in Kyoto, and are seen as supporting acts for Tokyo or Osaka's
main studios; but most of them are actually overseas.
Japanese companies want the work these overseas companies provide, but not the negative image
that many Japanese consumers have of games made by foreign companies.
As a result, these names go uncredited.
Now based on everything we've seen here, I want to bring up an old video game called
SEGAGAGA.
This is a video game about making video games.
It follows a young talented director who needs to put together a team and make a hit video
game before the company goes under.
It plays as a typical RPG along the lines of Earthbound.
The dungeons in the game are the rooms where game developers are.
You see, due to high stress levels of gaming developers, the company locks their employees
in a room to keep them from getting out.
The programmers start acting 'strange'.
They begin turning into monsters because they are only getting 2 hours of sleep per day.
Your job is to go into the dungeon, and insult the artists and programmers to 'beat'
them into submission and get them to work on your game.
The game was being made in good fun, but it reflects a real culture that these employees
often face.
It's basically SEGA making fun of itself and the practices prevalent within their industry.
It came at the end of the Dreamcast era, so SEGA was trying to make a statement about
how hard the gaming industry is, what the employees go through to meet deadlines, and
how tough it is to make games.
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this whole situation is how much pride salarymen
take in working such long hours.
If you've ever seen the Netflix documentary Jiro dreams of Sushi, you'll know what I mean.
It truly is inspiring to see so many people dedicate their lives to perfecting their trade.
But, that life is not for everyone, and the culture demands so much of people sometimes
that some people just aren't able to make it.
This isn't a problem unique to Japan, but it is one that Japanese society seems to have
a much harder time solving.
Japan, having such a foothold in the video game industry, has influenced the worldwide
market that has to try and compete with them.
Japanese people identify heavily with their work, and often, when working long hours,
they're doing it of their own accord.
That job is their life and they are going to put everything they have into it.
Just like they've been doing for thousands of years.
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