"When you're in the office 20 hours a day, you don't understand what life you're living for anymore. (It's so pathetic) you come to laugh." — Twitter post by Matsuri Takahashi, as reported in the Mainichi Shimbun

A week after the above message, Matsuri Takahashi, a 24-year-old first-year worker at Japan's largest advertising firm, Dentsu, committed suicide on Dec. 25, 2015, by jumping from a corporate dormitory.

Takahashi's mother, suspecting that labor conditions played a role in her daughter's suicide, lodged a formal complaint with a labor standards inspection office in Tokyo's Minato Ward.