Collision of Social Norms: Consideration from a Sexual Harassment Case in Japan

Since the introduction of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law in 1985, the term seku-hara, or “sexual harassment,†has been widely used in everyday life in Japan. However, accusing someone of sexual harassment is still difficult, and women often do not speak out for fear of secondary harm (Ito 2017; McNeil 2018). Against this backdrop, a sexual harassment accusation was levied by a female journalist against a top governmental bureaucrat in the Ministry of Finance in 2018. After a weekly news magazine reported this case based on an audio file secretly recorded by the journalist at a meeting, public debates arose over the “appropriateness†of the accuser’s actions, potentially leading to victim bashing. In this research, three main controversies are focused on: (1) the appropriateness of unauthorized recordings obtained by the journalist at the meeting, (2) leaking the audio to a media company that the journalist is not employed by, and (3) the “woman’s way of working†. Drawing on the Framing Theory (Entman 1993), this paper analyzes these issues, focusing on social and cultural norms that underlie differing opinions. We argue that the usual social norms and those social norms in the crisis must be distinguished with regard to (1). Regarding (2), some interpret her action as violating professional ethics, while others view it as a form of social resistance akin to whistleblowing. The third debate shows that conventional social values in Japan conflict with new labor ethics that seek gender equality in the workplace.