Name and shame: Japan’s tame answer to jobseeker sex harassment

Final-year students invited to recruiters’ apartments for help with their applications. Coffee dates with alumni who promise to explain how the company works. Inappropriate interview questions about boyfriends, marriage plans and sex lives.

For young women in Japan, looking for a job has long entailed submitting themselves to the skewed power dynamics of the recruitment process.

And before Thursday, no official legal safeguards existed to protect these jobseekers from such harassment.

Campaigners and advocates have welcomed the change, but say it lacks teeth and came years too late, even as societal attitudes may have already moved ahead of it.

“It is good that this has happened, but it has taken five years of discussions to get to the point where it has become law,” said Chisato Kitanaka, an associate professor of sociology at Hiroshima University who advises the government on gender issues.

“Government measures against sexual harassment in Japan are very weak, including this kind of harassment.”

Amendments to the Equal Employment Opportunity Act that took effect last week address harassment in its many forms and settings, from misbehaviour in the office to verbal abuse and threats from customers in shops, taxis and elsewhere. One section deals specifically with what the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare terms “job-seeking sexual harassment”.

The ministry’s website lists examples: staff who make sexual jokes or tease applicants such that it causes distress, who pressure them into a sexual relationship, or who repeatedly invite them to one-to-one meals or drinks.

Employers are now legally required to take steps to stop their staff harassing applicants in this way, with corporate compliance enforced through the threat of publicly shaming offending companies and exposing them to the prospect of civil lawsuits and financial damages.

Kitanaka called the changes a “step in the right direction”, but said they did not go far enough.

“There is no formal punishment for companies that let this happen, with the only real sanction the ministry releasing the name of the company publicly,” she said.

She expects large companies and organisations to enforce the rules more stringently than smaller firms, even as part-time workers, freelancers and others in precarious jobs continue to have too few protections.

Sumie Kawakami, a lecturer at Yamanashi Gakuin University and author of a book on gender issues, agreed that reform was long overdue.

“This isn’t something that has only been happening in recent years and is now being addressed,” she said. “It has been going on for decades.”

One in three

A survey of 1,000 recent jobseekers conducted by Japan’s labour ministry in 2023 showed that 31.9 per cent of respondents – nearly one in three – reported being harassed.

Unnecessary physical contact and questions about sexual matters were each cited by over 25 per cent of the harassed respondents, while nearly 29 per cent said they were on the receiving end of sexual jokes and teasing.

One in four of the men and women who had these experiences reported feeling less motivated in their job search and more than one in three said they felt “anger, dissatisfaction or anxiety”.

For two dozen or so, the effect on their mental health was such that they required hospital treatment.

In the past, companies typically tried to hush up such incidents, but a number of court cases over the years have shone a spotlight on the issue.

In 2019, a male construction company employee was charged with indecent assault after allegedly convincing a university student to come to his flat on the pretext of helping her prepare for an interview.

His employer, Obayashi Corp, apologised and promised to “urgently review” its procedures, subsequently setting up a harassment prevention office and conducting “emergency training” for staff involved in recruitment.

Prosecutors ultimately dropped charges against the man without publicly providing a reason. Whether he kept his job is unknown.

That same year, a 24-year-old trading company employee was arrested and charged with sexual assault and theft after a student he met through a networking app accused him of getting her drunk and using a stolen key to molest her in her hotel room. His employer, Sumitomo Corp, issued a statement soon after his arrest, confirming his disciplinary dismissal.

One of the most serious cases involved Kenshiro Maruta, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2023 for drugging and raping at least 10 female students who connected with him through apps designed to match jobseekers with university alumni and career counsellors.

His employer, Recruit Communications, fired Maruta following his arrest and launched an internal investigation, vowing to never allow such an outrage happen again.

“There have been many incidents in the past and gradually the government has changed its policies,” said Kitanaka, the sociologist. “Now, at last, they have changed the law.”

‘Not acceptable today’

Back in the 1980s, when gender studies lecturer Kawakami first joined Japan’s workforce, it was still dominated by men. Women had to work harder than their male counterparts just to be taken seriously or to advance, she said.

“Young women in the past did not feel that they could speak out when this happened to them because they wanted to get a good job and career,” she said of harassment.

Kawakami has watched attitudes shift in recent years, however, especially among the young women at her university preparing to start their careers.

“I think it has changed quite a lot,” she said. “There is far greater awareness among working people and companies about what constitutes unacceptable behaviour, and I believe employers are far less willing to tolerate sexual harassment.”

And while the threat of public naming and shaming a company might seem tame compared to criminal convictions, Kawakami says the threat “is a powerful one”.

“Companies are desperate to find capable and qualified staff nowadays, and negative publicity that would go with a sexual harassment accusation would be hugely damaging,” she said.

“Young women have lots of work options at the moment. Why would they go to a company that fails to act in a situation like this?”

One recent graduate, who declined to be named, told This Week in Asia that outlawing “clearly sexist” comments or actions by recruiters was a good idea, even if she did not believe that women of her generation would put up with such behaviour.

“If one of my friends were asked something inappropriate in an interview or were invited out for drinks, I’m certain that the man would be shouted at and his company would hear about it,” she said. “It’s just not acceptable today.”