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I don't typically post primary level comments in CW threads but I was having a conversation with my wife last night that prompted me. It's not particularly explosive and treads much of the same ground as many more nuanced posts before it.
Last night I'm in the middle of sorting out a chicken lasagna among other things and I get this text from my wife: Something shocking happened at work today.
I checked the clock. I sleep very early most nights and I calculated roughly what time she'd be getting home, added how much time she'd need to decelerate and actually sit down for dinner, how long after that she'd get the story tellable in her mind, then how long it would take to hear it, factoring in my own responses, if any, her reactions to those, and keeping in mind the obvious unknown variable that maybe the story would, indeed, be shocking. I knew I'd be sleeping later than usual.
Because none of the trivialities of my day mean anything to anyone here I'll get to the point. A temp worker at her company under her tutelage has made noises that she may be leveling some sort of harassment
suit(edit: complaint) (power probably). Not against my wife, but against her direct supervisor. The reason? This temp worker has three complaints that I can tell:She was said to resemble a well-known (by other people, not me) celebrity chef on her first day. It may be relevant that I do not know what this chef looks like or whether being compared to her might be taken as an insult or compliment. This, to me, seems to matter, but maybe it doesn't, as simply the acknowledgement that the temp worker has an observable appearance and that this appearance has made some impression may, in the end, be the sin at hand.
She was asked if she is on Facebook.
She was asked her birthday.
2 and 3 were asked because apparently the supervisor was prompted by Facebook to "friend" a person with the same name as the relevant temp worker. Unsure and with no profile photo to go on, but assuming it might be her as the kanji for her name is rare and matched that of the recommended person, he unwisely and perhaps naively made his inquiry. I assume he asked her birthday for the same reason (that seems to be the case.) All of the above was done in full earshot and view of my wife and others in the office. This suggests it was not a hamhanded prelude to some attempt at making contact for an out-of-office assignation.
All this has erupted in now a series of slightly delayed-reaction texts from this woman to her work group (of which my wife is a part.) Asking whether the company has any sort of guidelines on this (my wife used a different word than guidelines but I can't remember it) and prodding that her complaints be sent up the company chain-of-command. Presumably to the mainest of main offices. The first step of this is already occurring.
I sat there listening and kept thinking to myself how Japan always seems to import the worst of American culture. From shitty hiphop styles (I'm old) to self-entitled behavior when dealing with service personnel (many convenience stores now have a term: customer harassment [kasuhara] because people are such assholes to workers. And I mean assholes. Like getting the worker to dougeza because of some imagined infraction. It doesn't help that this is a country where people commit suicide over hurt feelings.) To now a willingess to go Defcon 4 over what, to me, seem the mildest of social grievances. The triumph of HR.
I've no idea if this woman has a legitimate legal case. Recently a Hyogo prefectural governor came under fire for the kind of inappropriate behavior one would expect from a Thai royal. Or is it? In some ways it's par-for-the-course in what has always been a very hierarchical society. Sempai lord their authority over kohai who grumble but then become sempai a year later and do the same thing to their underlings. But the Hyogo guy's vwry public scandal has put the term powaah hara in the public lexicon.
But then I don't necessarily expect much from the law here, which sometimes seems applied with such bizarre reasoning it makes me wonder if I should GTFO now.
The terms sekuhara, powaah hara, kasuhara and whatever else are all abbreviated forms of borrowed terms from English (sexual harassment, power harassment, customer harassment, etc.)
Anyway we'll see. My wife is upset because she wonders at the repercussions on her supervisor, whom she likes, and with whom she has a friendly working relationship. "If it becomes like this," she said, "how will anyone be able to work together at all?"
Possibilities: I'm hearing this at least once removed. Tone, language used, body language, eye contact, all are unknown to me (but will also be unknown to anyone who adjudicates this). Maybe this supervisor guy leers at the tempworker and my wife just isn't aware of it. Maybe the temp company assured her that at this work no one would ever ask her anything personal about anything and now that's happened. Maybe the temp worker is aware of some other infractions that have occurred in her sight and this is her way of bringing all into the harsh cleansing light. Maybe, as Jordan Peterson has suggested, men and women just may not be able to work together, despite common sense western (and eastern) assumptions.
I nodded. She was right: It was shocking. But I slept earlier than I had expected.
You're a gaijin married to a sinic. By her very nature, she will be more exposed and receptive to western cultural norms than her peers. She bears your children without her parents screeching in shame at the poisoning of their bloodline, but she can consume and repeat the worst of the western world as well. Thems the breaks.
An accusation of sekuhara sticking normally reflects the relative power distance within the organizational context, as opposed to any real incidence of sexual harassment. @100ProofTollBooth mentions the attractiveness meme, which is accurate enough and usually translates to 'know your place, trash' when it comes to ugly/weak men daring to talk to women, but within sinic cultures his point about male/female workplace dynamics has more relevance.
Power is an exercise in personal will in sinic companies, compared with western companies where power is the hand on the organizations internal levers. Sinic companies value the illusion of consensus, whereby decisions from on high are supported by the staff, in a 'together we die' manner. Lower ranks breaking this consensus publicly reflects either the weakness of their target, or failure of the superior to exercise his will. Breaking this illusion for personal benefit - even for legitimate reasons such as protecting oneself from harassment - is not just an attack on the infractor, but on the management style of the leader as a whole. The obvious solution would be to Human Resource the organization and put in place clear boundaries of rules responsibilities obligations and punishments to keep everyone strictly in their lane.
For sinic workplaces, this is a terrible outcome. Frictional administrative costs to organizational cohesion and rapidity of decision making accumulate extremely quickly in a Human Resourced environment, with flexibility of interdepartmental backscratching or team crunch torture being blocked off by policy diktats. Teams stick with managers or peers teams because there exists an expectation that push comes to shove these people will step up as well, allowing decisions and actions to be made quickly. Following a leader is easy because the leader tanks all the responsibility for fuckups, regardless of what the actual cause of the fuckup is.
This is obviously a highly imperfect system. There exists little means to hold nonperforming managers accountable, and people who are less willing to stand up for themselves will get bullied more easily. However, as we can see in the current example, entertaining witchhunts does more than burn the accused (maybe legitimately), it creates a flame. Those in the village will wonder if the witchhunter requires more fuel for the pyre, and those outside the village will wonder if the village is burning.
“Sinic?” As in “Chinese? Is this some racialist term of art, or is it a conflation of categories, like Moldbug’s “demotism” sleight-of-hand?
I observe that all your explanations also apply to small American businesses. But any one which scales up has to develop a managerial hierarchy. That opens the door for abuses of power, and in turn, an HR department evolves to prey on the excesses.
This is correlated with the loss of agility and the frictional costs, but I don’t believe it causes them. They are two sides of the same coin: managing risk. Larger businesses with more market share have more to lose. The main sequence is to ossify and appeal to policy. There’s also the Musk route: damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. This gambles on results but soaks a lot more hits along the way.
Under this model, Japan has scaled up businesses but is only now developing the HR immune system. Why now, and not in the 90s like the U.S.? A weak economy makes firms less risk-tolerant. The U.S. has been broadcasting its solution extra hard lately. But above all, I think, the Japanese workforce has only recently started to include more women. They cleared our level of female workforce participation in 2012. I think this is just how the switch to a service economy works.
Sinic as in northeast Asian as a catchall. China, Japan, Korea. Extends to legacy diaspora that maintained their cultural continuity too, like the overseas Chinese in southeast asia and the old holdouts in Flushing, Queens (the foreign Chinese are entirely bleached otherwise).
The point about agility being traded off against personnel excesses when implementing HR practices and the presented modal sinic organization being identical to all small enterprises holds, but I still maintain that sinic management companies are unique in ways I have to take time to articulate. I am myself Chinese, I have worked in large and small organizations white and Chinese and Japanese and Indian, lead and followed and strayed. There exists a unique quality of dictatorial fiat extant and expected of higher management, most analogous to an normally absent but overwhelming if present paternalistic military hierarchy.
Specifics on work style and internal strategy are secondary to the issue at hand, which is women speaking out against harassment. The non-HR system was obviously prone to abuses, with unworthy men exploiting their position to the detriment of junior female hires. However, I suspect that the HRfication of companies allows unworthy men to be deemed so by their failure to exercise the now-female hidden levers of power. In the older system, the unworthy men were exploiting a relationship arbitrage: their power distance to the overlord was shorter than the underlings, so suffer they must. In the HR world, the power distance is relative to the org tools each party can exploit. This levels/upends the playing field significantly, and lets juniors have a means of undermining superiors when it was impossible before.
Why would women complain about this? I will risk the ire of many here, but I am 100% sure it is a case of 'know your place, trash'. How dare this man, no matter his station, dare sully my environment with his unwanted affection. If the woman could, she would reserve her energy only for the most deserving of chads that are in her orbit, whether colleagues or clients.
Why do I posit this with such certainty? Because the greatest pushback against fraternization punishments in professional partnerships here is from women. Specifically, powerful senior women who boosted their early careers by dating and eventually marrying senior partners or clients. The entertainer gets to determine who is worthy to be entertained, and these women judge the game to be fair now as it was then.
No one wants to be sexually harassed. But once they have a taste of power, women have also found themselves indulging in its trappings and seeking means to perpetuate it for themselves.
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