Japan is celebrated for its exceptional levels of customer service. But the behavior of a growing number of customers and clients leaves a lot to be desired.
The rise of the abusive consumer has prompted authorities in Tokyo to introduce the country’s first ordinance — a locally approved regulation — to protect service industry staff from kasuhara — the Japanese abbreviated form of “customer harassment.”
While the Tokyo ordinance, which will go into effect in April, does not carry penalties, experts hope the move will highlight a growing social problem and, perhaps, encourage people to think twice before taking out their frustrations on staff.
Photo: Bloomberg
A union survey this year found that almost one in two workers in the service sector — which accounts for 75 percent of employees in Japan — had been subjected to customer meltdowns, ranging from verbal abuse and excessive demands to violence and doxing on social media.
In one instance, an assistant manager at a supermarket in Tokyo received a call from a shopper claiming that the tofu he had bought at the store had gone off, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. When the employee visited the shopper’s home to check, he found that the tofu — a product with a short shelf life — had been bought a fortnight earlier.
Not wanting to alienate the shopper, the employee tried to remain diplomatic but was then ordered by the customer to prostrate himself and apologize.
Outbreaks of rage have crept into local government offices, with one female employee at a Tokyo ward office recounting how an elderly resident accused her of wishing she would die and invited her to drop dead instead.
“It seems that people feel they can say whatever they want when dealing with public servants because they are paying tax,” the official told the Asahi Shimbun. “ I wish they could understand that employees are human beings too.”
The labor ministry is reportedly considering tightening the law further to address kasuhara across a wide range of sectors, including public transport, restaurants and call centers.
The Tokyo metropolitan assembly approved the ordinance last week under pressure from unions and industry representatives, which warned that the scourge of the disgruntled customer was spreading to other parts of the country.
Three other prefectures are considering similar measures, while some municipalities and firms now give employees the option of displaying only their given names on their ID badges. A Tokyo department store this year said it would ban troublesome customers and call the police in serious cases, while other firms, including Nintendo, have said they will not engage with abusive people.
The ordinance states that “no person shall engage in customer harassment anywhere” and that “society as a whole should try to prevent abuse,” but it recognizes the value to businesses of legitimate feedback.
Writing on the Nippon.com Web site, Hiromi Ikeuchi, a professor of sociology at Kansai University, attributed the rise of kasuhara to several factors, including the tendency to regard customers as “gods” in the battle to stay profitable in an increasingly tough business environment — an approach that has shifted the power balance from firms to their customers.
“As Japanese society as a whole became more consumer-oriented, the tables were turned, giving some consumers an unconscious bias that has caused them to expect to be treated like gods, as well as having certain expectations of staff,” Ikeuchi wrote.
Kasuhara is one of several forms of harassment Japan has been forced to confront in recent years, along with matahara (maternity harassment), pawahara (power harassment) and jenhara (gender harassment).
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.” Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
Among Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) villages, a certain rivalry exists between Arunothai, the largest of these villages, and Mae Salong, which is currently the most prosperous. Historically, the rivalry stems from a split in KMT military factions in the early 1960s, which divided command and opium territories after Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) cut off open support in 1961 due to international pressure (see part two, “The KMT opium lords of the Golden Triangle,” on May 20). But today this rivalry manifests as a different kind of split, with Arunothai leading a pro-China faction and Mae Salong staunchly aligned to Taiwan.