Blogs and Articles from Third Way Forum Membrs

・Currently, a vaccination harassment is going on in some workplaces where company leaders are forcing people to take the vaccination shots even if some people don’t want to take it. The guideline from the government and the management is that these shots are not mandatory. But some leaders want to make sure everyone gets the shots to prevent further spread of the virus.

・Sexual harassment has got a lot of attention and people got a much higher awareness over the past few decades. As compared with that, power harassment has been less highlighted in Japan and it seems still a lot of power harassments are going on in the Japanese society.

・Power harassment often falls into the pitfall of “my word against his word” without hard evidence. As it is more difficult to establish objective views than sexual harassment, power harassment often stay unaddressed.

・In the West, for instance in the UK, there used to be a brutal environment especially among working class people who were constantly exposed to bullying in their everyday life. However, the UK legal system got much stricter to address harassment cases and since then the situation has drastically improved.

・Some Western people are shocked to see some physical harassment among Japanese blue collar workers who frequently verbally abuse or even hit subordinates. Among big corporations, the disciplinary process is established and some level of awareness and mitigation efforts have been made. But among small and medium sized companies in Japan, the power harassment cases seem to be still left untouched.

・The question is why the Japanese government and corporate leaders do not take much tougher measures? Probably one of the reasons the Japanese are slow to take power harassment seriously is the concept of “The Whip of Love” (愛のムチ) that is a traditional belief that seniors and teachers whip those they love most. So the fact that someone is scolding at you means that someone loves you and cares about you. This kind of mentality may be causing the relaxed attitude of the Japanese toward power harassment. In fact, many Japanese find it harder to be ignored than being scolded at.

・The hierarchical nature of the Japanese society with strong power dynamics and the conflict averse character of the Japanese people make it highly unlikely that people fight back at the spot when bullied by someone. Because people do not fight back, the bullies continue bullying probably without self-awareness. If more Japanese fight back, bullies will think twice to bully the same person again.

・It is always hard to judge what is real harassment and what is still within the border of proper instruction/encouragement with the intent of helping the person. While we should be sensitive enough to address power harassment, we should not be oversensitive to call every single human tension a power harassment. Tensions exist among human beings and sometimes healthy tension is necessary for further team development.

・In addition, the a case might be judged different in different cultures. In particular, incidences which would clearly rated as harassment in US might be sort of borderline in Europe and not even viewed as a harassment case in Japan or Korea.

・There are two types of bullying. One is physical violence and the other one psychological bullying. Physical violence is hardly happening especially in professional organizations. However, psychological bullying is still happening everywhere and it is much more difficult to define and address.

・We will focus on psychological bullying in our discussion next week.