South Korea borrowed three Chinese characters from Japan to name its own workers dying at their desks.
Gwarosa (과로사) is a Sino-Korean compound built from three Chinese characters. 過 (gwa) means excessive. 勞 (ro) means labor. 死 (sa) means death. Together they translate to "death from overwork." The word is an orthographic borrowing from the Japanese karōshi (過労死), which uses the same three characters.1
Japan coined karōshi in the late 1970s after workers began suffering fatal strokes and heart attacks attributed to excessive hours. The first documented case was in 1969, when a twenty-nine-year-old shipping worker at Japan's largest newspaper company died of a stroke.2
South Korea adopted the term because it needed one. Among OECD countries, South Korean workers logged more hours per week than all but one other nation, and roughly fifty percent more than workers in Germany. Hundreds of workers died from overwork in 2017 alone, according to government data.3
The maximum legal workweek stood at sixty-eight hours until 2018, when the government reduced it to fifty-two, forty hours of regular work plus twelve hours of paid overtime.4
Labor attorneys traced the overwork culture to the Korean War. A structure designed to rapidly rebuild the economy became a custom that persisted long after the emergency ended. In 2023, the government briefly proposed raising the cap back to sixty-nine hours before a backlash from younger workers forced a reversal.5
South Korean law does not officially recognize death by overwork as a legal cause of death. The Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service considers fatal heart attacks or strokes suffered while working more than sixty hours per week for three consecutive months as eligible for workplace death compensation.6