Well, shit.

There's a word in Japanese, karoshi (過労死). It means "death from overwork". There have been two guys in Japan that I've been worried are headed down that road: the dude who teaches 3rd and 4th grade at my school, and the guy who does most of the union organizing for the foreign workers of Nambu (our union).

The guy who teaches 3rd and 4th grade (a combined class of ten - call your congressman and tell him that small classes rock) is in his first year, which means he's busy as hell. He's alway leaving halfway through the day to go to meetings around the prefecture, sometimes I look at his schedule and see that he's not scheduled to be done with the daily routine of teaching, grading, advising, and attending meetings until well after 8 or 9 pm. It's just the way it is here, these people are insane. Tokushige sensei (the teacher) gets like 3-4 hours of sleep most nights, is the first one at school in the morning and the last one out every day (unless he had to leave early to go to some conference). On top of that, since he's the only male teacher he organizes things like the sports festival, which take lots of extra work.

Anyway, today he had a meeting at 1:20 somewhere about an hour away, so he took lunch early and headed off. It was raining all day, and I ran into him in the office, we joked about me trying to read his schedule (meeting descriptions tend to be long strings of kanji - hard shit), and I told him to be safe out on the roads.

After I was done teaching his class sixth period, the staff told me he'd been in a wreck on his way to his afternoon meeting. Wrecked his car (he loved that car), the entire front end is gone, I think due to a fight with a truck. Tokushige's leg is broken, and he's in serious condition in a hospital at Narita. So I'm going to help cover his classes (can't do much about teaching them Japanese, but I can at least supervise while they're doing drills and stuff), and I'll try to go see him this weekend, give him some chocolates or something.

But what keeps bugging me is that when they told me about his accident, the first thing I thought was literally, "I'm surprised it took this long." Nobody should run themselves into the ground like that.