“Work till You Die?” is a narrative installation raising awareness and fostering discussion about the grueling office hours and phenomenon of ‘karoshi’—death from overwork—in Japan. 

Matsuri Takahashi, a young woman who worked at a top Japanese advertising agency, tweeted, “When you’re at the office 20 hours a day, you don’t even know what you’re living for anymore.” A week later, she took her own life. 

This project proposes using the façade of Takahashi’s former office building to display her Twitter posts. By manipulating window blinds, employees can make her messages visible, creating a powerful visual statement. The installation demonstrates my attempt to bring this idea to life.

The structure of the installation: 

Left: Takahashi’s tweets over three months, including those from her final days, serve as the starting point of this project.

Center: My proposal features a “mockup” image of a building, photoshopped to display the phrase “It’s too painful to work” in Japanese as the centerpiece.

Right: Correspondence with 15 individuals working in Japan, detailing whether they would participate in this project and their reasons for declining if applicable. This section also includes the varied occupations, ages, and genders of the interviewees, as well as my correspondence with the PR person at the ad agency who declined to support the project.

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I constructed this installation using metal bars and vellum paper to reflect the architectural elements of the original building. For the text part, I utilized the same font that Twitter used at the time to closely replicate the appearance of Takahashi’s tweets. This font, being a general typeface, was also ideal for presenting the correspondences, all of which were conducted via text messages.