Blogs and Articles from Third Way Forum Membrs

・Subtle forms of bullying and harassment are happening everywhere in Japan.

・Exclusion is the most typical form of such harassment. You exclude a person you don’t like from a meeting invitation, a dinner party and a group chat.

・Another method is by spreading bad rumors in a discrete way against a person you don’t like.

・Japanese people seem to have such a passive-aggressive way to target someone and make the targeted person feel the damage big time.

・However, as the Japanese do it in such a sophisticated and refined way, it is hard to know that you are targeted by someone. Quite often, by the time you realize that someone don’t like you and you are targeted, your enemy has already completed the siege net against you and you are already excluded from the group and cornered to a very bad position.

・Historically, as the Japanese women were in weaker positions than men in the business world, some Japanese women know how to manipulate male bosses easily. Knowing that most Japanese men get emotionally upset when a woman cries, some woman complains about her enemy (often another female employee) in front of her male boss with tears, pretending to be a real victim and asks the boss to take some actions against her. Some Japanese men are quick to believe such a story without objectivity and start developing bias against the targeted person.

・Also, sometimes a person who brings a harassment case to HR, Compliance, Legal etc could be the real person causing problems due to lack of self-awareness. For him, the world is against him and his problems are all caused by somebody else’s fault. Therefore, business leaders have to have objectivity and critical thinking ability to discern if the case that is brought up is a real harassment case or someone is just trying to accuse someone for self-interest.

・This kind of stealth tactic of bullying resembles like an old Ninja deployment. A Samurai warlord may keep peace and friendship with the warlord of the neighboring state in public but may be sending Ninjas behind the scene to spy on or even assassinate the rival warlord.

・In the West, when people don’t like someone they are often more vocal and direct. Probably one of the main reasons why the Japanese tend to resort to more subtle forms of harassment is because they do not express themselves often. Even if they don’t like something or they are suffering, they put up with it for a long time until they can not longer take it. Only when they reach the boiling point, they act with a strong revenge spirit and carry it out discretely and cunningly in order to stay anonymous and also to maximize the damage to the targeted person with some surprise element. It’s a nasty business.