Most suicide cases I believe come from excessive work, and Japan has a culture around this. This new minister's job is to effectively break part of the Japanese culture that's deeply embedded in their history.
https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/r2h-1-5.pdf
The leading reason for suicide is, by far, health problems. After that, you have economic/living situation, then domestic problems, then work-related problems ranking 4th.
Obviously, there could be overlap in some situations, but I think it's clear that "most" suicides do not stem from excessive work.
Table 2-3 shows the breakdown of "health problems," and depression is at about 40%. Even if all of those were due to overwork, this is only 40% of the "health problems" category, which is not enough to support a claim that "most suicides come from excessive work." For sure, there may be many cases that do, but there are no clear numbers in that regard. Personally, I feel such claims only reinforce the typical stereotypes about Japan rather than try to understand the actual situation.
I was thinking more on the root causes of those health problems, which might or might not be work related, that's just a belief of mine (that's why I provided no sources and wasn't very assertive)
I would be very surprised if this is the case... Any data to back it up?
This site has some stats on suicide due to overwork, but it doesn’t have a comparison to suicide due to other reasons. It’s definitely a thing though!
https://www.statista.com/statistics/622325/japan-work-relate...