Public Mourning and Human Accidents

Public mourning has a strong presence and significance in Japan.

People stop at jizos (stone Buddhas) or small shrines to pray for lost ones. The words 'namuamidabutsu' come unbidden to the lips of travelers in historic dramas. Watching the news or talking about it with Japanese, you hear arama, taihen or kawaiso (Oh dear, That's terrible, Poor thing). These are the semi-conscious ways in which Japanese express ninjou (人情), sympathy or human feeling.

All this stops in the case of suicides on railway lines. Although colloquially called 電車飛び込む自殺 (densha tobikomi jisatsu, suicide by throwing oneself at a train), inside trains they are announced by the euphemism 人身事故 (jinshin jiko, literally human body accident). The use of 'accident' distinguishes it from 'incident' (事件 jiken), a passive term used for a crime implying criminal fault, while the use of the depersonalized 人身 (jinshin, or human body as found in collocations like 'slave trade' or 'human sacrifice'.

I have gone from a daily 5 hour to just under 3 hour commute, time which I use for reading and writing on my tablet. I haven't kept track of how many times my trains have been stopped or delayed, but it is several times a year as I pass through the urban areas of Kyoto and Osaka on my route.  I have noted reactions to the announcement - an old man beside me groans and sighs. A woman starts texting she will be late. Workmen tsk tsk. Someone laughs.

I have often wondered how Japanese people, so normally respectful in the face of death, can appear so callous regarding the no less tragic 'human accidents'. 

As Saldaña (2011) notes, using the euphemism has the effect of 'shrouding' or framing such suicides as a routine part of the commute. In this context, a 'human accident' is a delay equal to 'maintenance' or 'weather warnings' and is thus equally unworthy of sympathy, except for the inconvenienced passengers themselves. The passive and depersonalized nature of the term 'human accidents' certainly contributes to this normatization of suicide-by-train.

Although the term 'human accident' may seem euphemistic, it is the perfect moniker. To the Japanese, these people are accidents, breaking over others in unavoidable ways. They have chosen to extinguish themselves in a way most visible to others, that most affects them, and worst of all, inconveniences them the most.

However, this normatization of 'human accidents' conflicts with the popular impression that suicides by train involve a high cost to the deceased's family. Possibly to prevent other suicides, a myth of high cost has grown that employs both Japanese of funeral rituals and the obligation to not inconvenience the family. Japanese urban legend states that families of human accidents' will have to pay 100 million yen in reparations - roughly a million dollars. In fact, pay puts rarely exceed 1 million yen (J-Cast 2008). This legend serves as a warning or precaution to ward off people thinking of taking their lives on the train tracks. Ironically, by affixing a high price to human accidents, Japanese common sense replicates one of the rituals of the funeral, the paying of money gifts to help cover costs of the ceremony, and appeals to the Japanese sense of family by incurring guilt of leaving remuneration costs to loved ones. 

The flip side of this phenomenon is that such accidents are often caused by the quest for profit through exploitation of workers conditioned to conformity, who can only think of death as escape from work. This is exacerbated by the paucity of mental health resources, the pressure to work overtime, and to sacrifice all for the workplace, all of which combine to make the site of transit to the office also the site of the decision to end it in the most final way.

I hope to do some preliminary surveys on this topic in my classes this semester.
Sources

Sources
Saldaña, Mark, "Tokyo's "Human Accidents": Jinshin Jiko and the Social Meaning of Train Suicide" (2011). Anthropology Honors Projects. Paper 10.http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/anth_honors/10

人身事故という名の「電車飛び込み自殺」　「遺族に1億円請求」は都市伝説か. (2008).

[Is the 1 million yen payout an urban legend?] . J-cast news.
http://www.j-cast.com/2008/08/14025166.html?p=all

Calculating The Business Costs of Power Harassment

(A version of this article also appeared on my Linked In page)

A January 2017 poll by EN-Japan indicated that 45% of business in Japan have experienced power harassment, while 56% percent are taking steps to deal with it (Kigyou no Pawahara jittai chousa). These figures indicate that power harassment is not only epidemic in Japan,  they also imply that it is endemic here.

There are several reasons why power harassment is so prevalent in the Japanese workplace. As I saw during my time as a victim, industry anti-harassment initiatives are ineffective and impossible to implement or enforce completely. Policies are hobbled by the difficulty of defining power harassment, mostly due to the vagueness of government and industry guidelines, which also explains the difficulty of acquiring accurate statistics of harassment numbers. The ‘epidemic’ has strong cultural roots in Japan’s vertical society, where abuse naturally rolls downhill, and Japanese routinely put up with verbal and other forms of abuse that would not be tolerated in my home country. This cultural discourse also encourages workers to 'toughen up' and not make any noise if harassed. Finally, although media focuses on the victim and their pain once an incident comes to light, this is precisely what goes ignored by the employer. 

In my case, I reported to company harassment officers who listened to my story without doing anything, and even abandoned their investigation halfway through. The general office stepped in to mediate after things had escalated out of control, but my harassers went unpunished, while the structure that allowed their behavior went unchanged, and my settlement was meager by foreign standards. If top down policies and laws don’t affect power harassment, and if harassers are unmoved by the visible suffering of their victims, how can businesses be expected to change?

There is another way to look at the problem of power harassment that might have more effect on companies, and show that tackling harassment is in their best interests. By doing a cost assessment of power harassment, we can show that covering up or allowing the structural problems to persist is more costly in the long run than creating an environment that avoids it, or mediating on a case-by-case basis as soon as incidents come to light.

As a harassment survivor, I know firsthand that my former employer was more willing to pay for my silence than to pay to fix their problems. Moral judgments aside, was their decision to cover up power harassment actually cost effective?

First, my settlement consisted of me being paid to be absent from work while someone substituted for my classes. This means that for my final month of teaching they paid double my salary, then for the following four months after the term they lost any labor I would have done, but continued to pay me. They also recognized their responsibility in my loss of work there, entitling me to the highest class of unemployment insurance at their expense.

Next, in addition to the loss of my work, they paid office worker hours for drawing up the settlement agreement and NDA, meeting with me, writing reports, and for meetings about the incident. I imagine there were many meetings with my harassers, whose own productivity was thus cut into. The supervisor who had harassed me was a micromanager, but after the incident and my complaints he withdrew into his office, cancelling scheduled weekly meetings and monthly projects. This incurred another drop in productivity.

Third, loss of productivity and efficiency was not only directly related to me, but also extended to my colleagues and entire department. My coworkers began to record all interactions with administration staff, and physically avoided going to places where they were likely to run into them. The staff in return reduced interaction, bringing communication to a standstill.

Fourth, there was the loss in confidence of students, ie paying customers, as well as a sharp fall in talented applicants for jobs at my workplace. After I left no new full-time teachers joined the department, which meant that the section became underperforming and had to rely on part-timer staffers who did none of the extracurricular activities (such as open campus days) usually run by full-timers.

Fifth, the whole incident shed light on how anti-harassment resources were wasted. It came to light that my supervisor did not go to voluntary faculty harassment seminars, that harassment officers only followed up cases involving students, not staff, and that my case was not the first at that institution. This is not to mention the institution’s efforts to block my access to harassment guideline information, which could have been a costly illegal misstep had we gone to court.

Clearly, ‘resolving’ my harassment ran my employer into significant costs, and the damage to its reputation persists to this day. Conversely, had my employer followed through with the initial investigation, decided punishment as per their own guidelines, and came clean about the incident, they would have recouped my wages, avoided a costly drop in productivity with staff and faculty, deflected damage to their reputation among customers, and profited from re-branding as a progressive and thus attractive workplace. If businesses could be made to see that allowing silencing victims and cleaning up for harassers is a cost that they would be better off avoiding, this may be another piece in the puzzle of reducing power harassment.

Sources

Kigyou no Pawahara jittai chousa

https://corp.en-japan.com/newsrelease/2017/3449.html

Gender and Dreams: Japanese Payday Loans

See this picture?

These billboards are visible on my way to work every morning, when I walk from the Japanese Railway Osaka Station to switch trains at the Umeda Hankyu Railway Station. Both billboards are advertising Mobit, a payday loans company here in Kansai.

Both boards are variations on the same themes and images.

There is the face of actor Naoto Takenaka, best known for the smash hit film Shall We Dance? that inspired a remake starring Richard Gere. Takenaka's enlarged head stares wistfully out of the board, eyes piercing through circular-rimmed glasses, a fedora on his head, stubble on his chin and looking tanned and vigorous. Next to the Moa-like bust of Takenaka is a reduced halfshot of actress Natsuna in a red silk dress playing violin. Natsuna became an actress after being scouted for her beauty and became star of several TV dramas.

The contrast between the two images is strong. The man is dressed conservatively, even his eyes are covered. The woman is in red silk dress, arms, legs and head bare. Her clothing exudes femininity, openess, approachability, a red of strength and sexuality in direct opposition to his detached watcher's face and muted tones.

The genderized message is clear. Women need loans to be sexy and alive, to be and make the art the man appreciates. The loan allows the woman to be watched. The man conversely is deepened by the loan, made wiser and stylish, and in the position of observer.

Men are targeted in another way - the billboards can also be read as inviting men to become 'sugar daddies', patrons of women who become works of art.

Does this approach match the population of users? Let us consider that the top three users of such loans are women 40 - 49 years old (25.8%), women 20-39 (20.9%), and men aged 40-59 (19.1%). This 'double targeting' of middle-aged men and elision of middle-aged women, who are both already a large customer base and not considered suitable for an ad based on female sex and youth, may thus be read as an attempt to enlarge the market share of middle-aged men, who will incur both their own costs and the women they support.

Public advertisements are texts that speak to all people, appealing to their hopes and fears in the attempt to create necessity for their product. In the case of payday loans, they appeal to culturally ingrained discourses of gender relations that require finanial capital to maintain. In the case of Japan especially, the cultural acceptance of 借金　(shakkin or borrowed money/debt) in novels, movies, films, as well as the 'life stories' of executives and entertainment district workers is huge and thus impacts the psyche of the average Japanese, who sometimes kill, die, or sell themselves to pay off their or other's debts.

This is a larger topic for another time.



Sources

Mobit homepage.
http://pc.mobit.ne.jp/web/pc/AP300S0000.do?pub=GOGPC_10011031_NA000001_8537&on=Z787764&df=1

Nippon Statistics Center. (2012). Shakingyou riyousha ni kansuru chousa kenkyuu [Research survey about payday loan users].
www.fsa.go


Yahoo talent informtion website, Natsuna.
http://talent.yahoo.co.jp/pf/detail/pp261230