For much of his 30-year career, Hiroaki Kushioka's office was a closet-like room. A college graduate, he would pass the time gardening or shoveling snow. His bosses denied him promotion and repeatedly pressured him to quit.
His offense? Being a whistleblower, in a nation where corporate loyalty is so highly valued that employees who report managerial misdoing are shunned as traitors.
That's why the battle this 59-year-old waged to expose price-rigging in the trucking company that employed him has been solitary and has gone largely unnoticed until recently.
PHOTO: AP
"If I hadn't done it, I would have regretted it," he said in an interview.
But Kushioka, a man with fiery eyes and an insistent tone, may have helped break new ground: Japan recently passed its first law to protect whistleblowers from workplace retribution.
The law, taking effect next April, is a response to a spate of scandals that have hit Japan Inc over the last several years -- the cover-up of auto defects at Mitsubishi Motors Corp, mislabeling of meat at Snow Brand Foods Co, hiding of bad debts at UFJ Bank.
Those scandals and others at police departments, hospitals and a nuclear power plant all surfaced because of whistleblowers.
As Japanese companies globalize, concern about corporate governance and transparency is growing. In recent years, companies fearing for their image have set up hot lines for whistleblowers.
But consumer advocates and legal experts say the law is just a start and Japan remains far behind the US and other industrialized nations in protecting whistleblowers from retribution.
Kushioka and others say the law's protections don't go far enough, pointing to a passage that instructs people to talk to their company before going to the media or outside authorities unless lives are at risk. They argue that talking to the company won't work because a management gone bad is apt to squelch a whistleblower rather than respond in good faith.
But proponents of the law say it's a start.
"Up to now, in Japan, where old-style thinking is so entrenched, people have kept silent," said Kazuko Miyamoto, a consumer rights advocate who sat on the panel that worked on the law. "Most scandals here are carried out systematically by companies, not individuals, and the entire company tends to get involved in cover-ups."
In a society where corporations offer lifetime employment and demand family-like team work, whistleblowers risk being ostracized by colleagues and demoted. Strict labor laws make it hard to fire workers, so harassment is used to force out undesirable workers.
Ostracism is so common it has a name, madogiwa, or "sitting by the window."
Kushioka's battle began when he was an eager recruit with a law degree at Tonami Transportation Co, and discovered it was illegally inflating bills in a cartel.
When his bosses and labor union took no action, he went to the newspaper that gave him his college scholarship, then to lawmakers and prosecutors.
Over the years, he was stuck at an entry-level salary and he passed his time at work planting tulips and potatoes. While his wife quietly supported his fight, his two children never knew what he was enduring.
This year Kushioka got some vindication for his long ordeal when a court ruled he was a whistleblower deserving protection and ordered his employer pay him ?13.5 million (US$128,000) in compensation. He had held off suing until 2002, waiting until his children finished school and his son got a job.
The company is not appealing the ruling, noting in a brief statement that the view on whistleblowers has changed over the last 30 years. It declined further comment.
Kushioka is appealing to a higher court, demanding an apology from the company.
Yoichi Shimada, professor of law at Waseda University in Tokyo, hopes Japanese companies will now set up their own system to solve problems.
"Up to now, whistleblowers for the most part have ended up with tragic lives. And brave individuals had to give up their whole lives," he said.
But Kushioka, who reaches retirement age next year, doesn't feel his years of isolation were a waste.
"Every company needs a whistleblower," he said. "I've led a very meaningful life."
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