Japan’s overwork culture is among the most quantified in the world. The Japan Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s 2022 White Paper found that 10.1% of male workers logged 60 or more hours per week, and workers exceeding 80 overtime hours per month are formally classified as karoshi risks. McKinsey’s 2023 Global Health Survey of more than 30,000 workers across 30 countries placed Japan last among all surveyed nations for employee well-being, with only 25% reporting good overall health against a 57% global average, and 27% reporting outright burnout symptoms — among the highest of the 30 countries surveyed. No survey directly asks Japanese workers whether they regret staying in a high-overtime job, so the 27% burnout-symptom rate stands in as a transparent dissatisfaction proxy for the action side rather than a true regret figure.
The regret landscape for those who leave is measured more directly. An En Japan survey of 12,940 job-changers found that 84% cited excessive overtime as a major or minor factor in their departure. A separate Tenshoku Kaigi survey of 1,034 recent job-changers asked whether the move had been a success or a failure: 74% called it a success and 26% called it a failure — one in four regret having changed jobs, mostly because of a gap between the company they imagined and the one they joined. The remaining three in four do not, which fits a structural feature of the labour market: Japan’s nenko joretsu seniority system ties wages and promotion to tenure, so workers who leave sacrifice long-run earnings accrual even when their immediate well-being improves. The OECD Better Life Index scores Japan at 3.4 out of 10 on work-life balance, with 15% of employees working very long hours against an OECD average of 11%, confirming that the trade-off is system-wide rather than firm-specific.
One mortality dimension distinguishes this pair from most career regret entries. Government guidelines formally classify workers sustaining 80+ overtime hours per month as at risk of karoshi (death from overwork), a mortality dimension that does not appear in standard satisfaction surveys. On the survey measures the two sides look almost level — 27% of stayers report burnout symptoms against 26% of leavers who regret the move — but those numbers measure different things and omit mortality entirely. The action side carries a documented physical risk that the inaction side does not, so the headline near-tie understates how much heavier the cost of staying can be.