Japan measures workplace stress but rarely acts on it: fix the response loop, not the test

Ryutaro Nakagawa and Nami Yamamura

No xdcnj_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Since 2015, Japanese law has required every workplace with 50 or more employees to screen workers for psychological stress once a year. A decade on, the program's effect on mental health remains unproven. We argue that this is not a failure of measurement but of response. The evidence is consistent: completing the stress survey, receiving individual feedback, or attending a physician interview does not by itself improve distress; the only component linked to better outcomes is improvement of the psychosocial work environment, and that step is carried out after only a small minority of assessments. By average annual hours Japan now sits in the middle of the OECD, yet the incidence of very long working weeks remains high and is masked by that average, and the country's suicide rate is among the highest in the comparison. Across countries these structural indicators track outcomes only weakly, which is reason to distrust ecological arguments and to anchor causal claims in individual-level cohorts. We draw on the logic of infectious-disease surveillance, where the speed of the detection-to-response loop matters more than the precision or frequency of measurement, to reframe what a useful stress-monitoring system should optimize. Raising the frequency of individual screening, or lowering its cost, targets the wrong bottleneck. The lever is a fast, low-cost path from a detected problem to a change in the work environment. This is a framework proposal; its central prediction, that closing the loop raises the rate of environmental action, is testable and should be tested.

Date: 2026-10-15
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:xdcnj_v1

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/xdcnj_v1

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