The twin crises of overwork and burnout are reshaping economies across Asia. In Japan, the toll of karōshi, death from overwork, continues to rise, while in China, entrepreneurs are seizing on exhaustion itself as a business opportunity. Meanwhile, South Korea faces its own challenges, with a culture that glorifies long hours and productivity often at the expense of mental health. Governments across the region are beginning to address these issues, introducing policies aimed at reducing work hours and promoting work-life balance. However, the deeply ingrained societal norms around work ethic make progress slow.
Key takeaways
- Japan’s rising cases of karōshi highlight how entrenched overwork culture persists despite policy reforms.
- In China, burnout itself has become a booming business, with entrepreneurs selling wellness and resilience solutions.
- The commercialization of “anti-burnout” risks masking systemic labor issues while profiting from exhaustion.
Together, they illustrate the paradox of the “overwork economy”: systems that both demand more than workers can give and then monetize their recovery.
Japan’s crisis deepens
Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare reported record cases of deaths and health disorders linked to overwork in 2024, according to MyThaiSpot. The data show a surge in mental health-related cases, including suicides, as well as strokes and heart disease triggered by extreme working hours.
Despite reforms intended to cap overtime and encourage healthier work practices, loopholes and entrenched corporate culture persist. As the Financial Times notes, some Japanese firms are turning to productivity tools and automation to reduce dependency on long hours, but critics warn that without cultural change, many measures amount to “cosmetic fixes.”
China’s burnout generation
In China, meanwhile, a different dynamic is playing out. The so-called “996” culture , working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, has left a generation drained. Into that void has stepped a new class of entrepreneurs selling wellness, therapy, and emotional guidance.
One example, profiled by The Guardian, is Li Jianxiong, a former marketing executive who founded Heartify, a network offering group therapy and self-improvement classes. Heartify has tapped into a widespread sense of “neijuan”, or involution, the feeling of endless competition with diminishing returns. Its courses promise not systemic change, but personal resilience and coping strategies.
Li frames his mission as empowerment, but the rapid growth of such ventures underscores how burnout itself has become a market opportunity.
The commercialization of “anti-burnout”
Across Asia, a new industry has taken shape: selling relief from the very conditions workplaces create. From corporate wellness apps and counseling contracts in Japan to self-help courses and retreats in China, “anti-burnout” has become a growth sector.
The FT highlights how Japanese companies increasingly buy into external wellness programs, while The Guardian shows how China’s private mental health sector is expanding rapidly, filling gaps left by overstretched public systems.
Yet this trend raises uncomfortable questions:
- Does treating burnout as an individual problem obscure systemic causes like long hours, toxic management, and weak labor protections?
- Are wellness products and services becoming just another performance metric, more “work” piled onto already exhausted lives?
- And most fundamentally, can a market built on exhaustion ever truly resolve it?
A global warning
Japan’s rising karōshi cases and China’s burnout boom reflect a broader global reality: modern economies are pushing human limits. The danger is that as long as exhaustion can be monetized, the incentive to reduce it at the root remains weak.
Until regulation, workplace reform, and cultural shifts catch up, the overwork economy risks locking millions into a cycle where they pay, sometimes with their wages, sometimes with their lives, for relief from the very system that drains them.
