Artists and business folk alike have been lamenting the toll of increasingly demanding workloads for generations. In the digital workplace, flexible working arrangements are keeping people up at all hours answering emails and many disadvantaged groups are playing career catch-up with unpaid work experience – it’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it.
Journalist Marc Fennell and producer Claire Aird have been investigating the acceleration of this overworking phenomenon in Japan, along with the country’s plummeting birth rates. Their documentary Sex in Japan: Dying for Company looks at the sex lives, worklands and relationships of millenials in Japan: half the cohort are virgins and 70 per cent are single. The whole country is also working a lot, and to their detriment. The Japanese word karoshi means ‘death from overwork’, and in the 2018 financial year 190 people died or attempted suicide due to karoshi.
After a screening of their 30-minute docco, Fennell and Aird will explore the potential influences behind Japan’s stressed out, undersexed generation – and lonely workaholics the world over – in this talk for Vivid Ideas. In a conversation with sex tech expert Bryony Cole, they’ll be unpacking work, love and loneliness alongside evolving gender roles, the growing sex industry and changing paradigms of social relationships.
