New forms of harassment keep emerging in Japan, and the possibilities are endless

We are a harassed, harassing species. “At our company,” a mid-level executive tells Shukan Gendai (Nov 9), “you need to obtain certain machine-handling qualifications within five years of being hired. ‘Have you qualified yet?’ I asked one of the people under me. ‘That’s harassment,’ was the reply. ‘What?’ Next day I was called in to personnel and given a warning.” Employees are not to be pressured. Nor queried, apparently, for fear of implied pressure.

Exasperation wells up: “The ground is strewn with landmines! You can’t talk to your staff anymore!”

Harassment – of the weak by the strong, the innocent by the guilty, the happy by the spitefully unhappy, the unhappy by the insensitive happy, the unconventional by the conventional and vice versa – is, we may suppose, as old as human relations. A turning point in its history in Japan came in 1989, the year a woman took her boss to court for unwanted sexual advances.

She won, and a new word entered the Japanese language: sekuhara, sexual harassment. It was Buzzword of the Year, still buzzing 35 years later. Other forms of hara soon followed. They sprang up like mushrooms: pawahara (power harassment), jen (gender) hara, mata (maternity) hara, pata (paternity) hara, mora (moral) hara – and more, much more. The irate executive quoted above was guilty, though surely without malice aforethought, of shikahara, from shikaku, the Japanese word for “qualification(s).” 

He feels more sinned against than sinning, however, victim in his own mind of what is widespread enough to have acquired a name of its own: harahara, harassment harassment, when everyone you deal with, in or outside the workplace, is poised to cry “Harassment!” at every word you speak – with possible legal implications, so walk on eggshells and speak carefully.

How do I harass thee? Let me count the ways. Forty-four, says the nonprofit Japan Harassment Association. It counsels companies and staffs on recognizing, avoiding, preventing and responding to harassment real or imaginary. Most of the 44 types it has identified to date were unheard of a decade ago. And what new types will the decade ahead spawn? 

There’s hardly a prefix, Japanese or English, immune to the suffix hara. Pa (personality) hara: snide remarks about a person’s appearance, character, lifestyle or circumstances. Reri (religion) hara: self-explanatory. Ei (age) hara: “At your age you wouldn’t understand” – once the elder generation’s claim to wisdom the young were yet to acquire, now more often the younger generation’s contempt for their elders’ failure to keep up. Kafe (caffeine) hara: pressing coffee or tea on people with low caffeine tolerance. Kara (karaoke) hara: pressing karaoke on people with low karaoke tolerance. So (social media) hara: “‘Follow me,’ ‘like me,’ and suchlike wheedling that doesn’t lightly take no for an answer.” Roji (logic) hara: driving a person into a corner with unanswerable logic. (That’s bad?) Buri (breathing) hara; igu (exist) hara: what could they be?

Waku (vaccine) hara, offspring of the COVID crisis: pressure to vaccinate. Gyakuwaku reverse-vaccine) hara: twin and opposite. Rimo (remote) hara: undue surveillance of staffers working from home on the supposition that anyone doing so will naturally be goofing off. This can take several forms, from the constant convening of online “meetings” to demands to “keep your camera on” – and, implicitly, dress and make up appropriately, since no one wants to be seen on camera looking less than their best, and tidy your house too, at least the part of it you can’t help broadcasting, engendering a self-consciousness that cringes at, for example, neko (cat) hara – the cat wanders within camera range and there goes your businesslike, professional image.

Employers want their employees to feel at home at work. A friendly easygoing workplace promotes productivity; harassment fouls the air, putting everyone on edge and off stride. Partly in compliance with recent anti-harassment legislation, partly out of self-interest, companies increasingly are making rules, setting guidelines, deputizing personnel, to deal with the issue, nipping it in the bud when possible, otherwise arbitrating disputes as they arise. And arise they do: 132,252 of them in 2022, according to the labor ministry.

As obnoxious as harassers are those who are forever running to personnel crying harassment. From consultant Yuko Zando Shukan Gendai hears this story, not of one case only, she says, but of a growing number: An employee charges power harassment and demands the offender be punished. “We’ll look into it,” says the company. Lawyers are consulted; the lawyers shake their heads: no, under the law that’s not harassment. The employee, so informed, is outraged: “But before I reported it I asked ChatGPT” – the AI chatbot – “and it said it was!”

It’s the ultimate roji-hara, minus the logic. What the company’s answer was we’re not told.

© Japan Today