July 15, 2024
TOKYO – Japan, known for its exacting service standards, is now taking a stronger stance against a growing scourge of customer harassment to protect its legions of service workers from abuse.
On July 9, Takashimaya became the first major department store to announce measures against such harassment – kasuhara in Japanese. It warned that it will ban recalcitrant perpetrators from its stores and call in the police for hostile cases.
Earlier on June 28, All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines teamed up to create guidelines to protect their staff. They defined kasuhara as “actions by customers who take advantage of their superior position to commit illegal acts or make unreasonable demands, harming the work environment of employees”.
Japan has long deified the customer as kamisama (God) but is now reassessing the idea that the “customer is always right”.
The ruling Liberal Democratic Party has vowed to act with a law to be brought before the Diet.
Meanwhile, Tokyo will likely be the first of Japan’s 47 prefectural assemblies to pass an ordinance against the scourge.
A Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) spokeswoman, noting that kasuhara is worsening in numbers and intensity, told The Straits Times: “There are cases in which workers are subject to character defamation and suffer psychological damage from excessive demands or unjustified complaints by customers.”
TMG’s proposed ordinance will clearly state that “no one shall engage in customer harassment”, but will not include penalties.
The spokeswoman added that this is because spelling out actions that amount to kasuhara could be counterproductive and “send the wrong message that conduct outside of the definition is permissible”.
The service sector accounts for 70 per cent of Japan’s workforce, according to government data.
Customer harassment may range from verbal insults to physical altercations. Some staff are made to apologise by kneeling and prostrating themselves, while others are berated by customers for hours on end. Others suffer online doxxing, with their private information shared.
In June, convenience-store giant Lawson said it is giving employees an option not to display their full names on badges, following in the footsteps of FamilyMart, which enacted the policy a month earlier.
Pharmacists, supermarket cashiers, bus and taxi drivers as well as front-line staff at ward offices increasingly have the option of anonymity.
Companies such as East Japan Railway Company and Nintendo have also said they will not engage with abusive clients.
Kasuhara has resulted in mental health issues such as psychological trauma and depression, especially for employees from companies where there is no support system, said Dr Kyoko Shimada from Kokoro Balance Lab, which researches mental health matters.
There has been at least one suicide linked to kasuhara. In 2018, a 26-year-old employee of Osaka-based pork bun chain 551 Horai killed himself after irate customers told him to “die” and said he was “useless”. His family is now seeking damages.
The flip side of Japan’s uncompromising service standards is that they unrealistically raise expectations and feed the perception of a hierarchical relationship, experts said.
Sociologist Hiromi Ikeuchi from Kansai University’s Graduate School of Psychology said: “Over-the-top service leaves customers satisfied, but can create excessive demands that ‘it is normal to be served’. The problem is that people are taking advantage and making selfish or unreasonable demands.”
Various polls indicate that about one in two service-sector workers experienced kasuhara in recent years, with the majority of perpetrators being men in their 40s or older.
Dr Masayuki Kiriu, Toyo University’s dean of sociology and a profiling expert, said: “The deterioration of Japan’s economy, widening economic disparities and a sense of stagnation are said to have been a cause of frustration.”
Perpetrators of kasuhara are often imbued with a superiority complex and “look down on people who serve them”, he added, noting that a legitimate complaint may be differentiated from an act of harassment in the tone and attitude adopted by the customer.
Recognising that it is a social problem, the Labour Ministry in 2022 issued guidelines on how to protect employees from kasuhara. This was followed by the revision of standards in 2023 to recognise trauma caused by customer harassment as a workplace accident.
Further, a 2022 survey by the Japan Trade Union Confederation, or Rengo, found that 76.4 per cent of service-staff respondents had been negatively impacted by kasuhara, with one in 10 quitting his or her job.
Tech companies are coming up with solutions, with SoftBank building an artificial intelligence (AI)-based software that can tune out the anger in people’s voices on phone calls, which it aims to commercialise by March 2026.
The voice-altering technology makes angry people sound calm on the phone, thus shielding workers from the stress that comes from dealing with yelling customers.
Dr Kiriu is working with Fujitsu to build an AI-driven customer-harassment training tool that can coach employee responses to abusive customers and diagnose each individual’s threshold for harassment to help companies draw up guidelines.
He noted that the official recognition of kasuhara as a cause of workplace accidents has created a paradigm shift in how firms regard the issue, as they now have a duty to protect their staff.
Dr Kiriu and Dr Shimada belong to an advisory group helping companies draw up measures against kasuhara.
Said Dr Shimada: “Victims feel stress both directly from the abuse, but also indirectly by not having the support of their colleagues or employer. They end up shouldering the burden themselves.”
Given Japan’s chronic labour shortage, Professor Ikeuchi said companies must devote more attention to the welfare of service workers and not regard them as dispensable.
“Otherwise, retail standards will suffer, which could result in a vicious circle of more harassment and more people quitting,” she added.