A single word for "death from overwork" – imagine that! You've probably seen the astonishment over that fact in contexts like this WIRED article: "And in a nation that actually has a word for 'death from overwork,'...", the gist of which is that the existence of a single word for the concept reveals its unusual severity or significance in Japan. 

In fact, there is a single word for "death from overwork" in Japanese: karoushi (過労死). There's no argument about that (well, except maybe from those claiming that Japanese has no words). The word exists.

What I'm debunking here is the overworked meme that the phenomenon's single-word status has any significance whatsoever. It doesn't. Read more about Debunked: "OMG Japanese has a single word for 'death by overwork' "!

One of the most beloved Japanology memes overseas involves the word kaizen (or Kaizen to some). Here's the definition from the New Oxford American Dictionary:

kaizen |ˈkaɪzən|
noun: a Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement of working practices, personal efficiency, etc.

That sometimes gets further embellished by eager writers who extend kaizen to carry continuous improvement out of the business realm, and "throughout all aspects of life", per one definition I've seen. Whatever the specifics, what you'll find in common across all definitions is that kaizen is a Japanese word for "a Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement".

Unfortunately, that's wrong. Read more about Debunked: "kaizen = Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement"

Surely you've heard this one: the Chinese word for "crisis" (危機, weiji in Chinese, kiki in Japanese) is composed of the two characters for "danger" and "opportunity". This reveals the wise Oriental insight that a crisis is an oportunity for progress, an impressive outlook we'd all do well to emulate. Or so we've been told for decades by management gurus, New Age philosphers, generic pundits, and even world leaders.

But as you might guess from that lead-in, the claim is false. Let's take this opportunity to aid a word in crisis: Read more about Debunked: "Crisis = Danger + Opportunity"

I'll dip again into my bag of old newspaper clippings. This one is from the October 10, 1994 issue of The Japan Times, in the Nihongo and I column: "Language change inevitable", a discussion with Professor Kikuo Nomoto, former director of the National Language Research Institute. Read more about A dose of sensibility: Japanese not so difficult

The latest JIN Newsletter discusses the high-tech toilets made by Japanese companies like TOTO. All fine and good, except for one comment stumbling into culturology:

It is ironic that Japan, that imported the very concept of sit-down toilets from the West, is now at the center of cutting edge lavatory technology. Read more about On toilets, TOTO and irony