A zainichi woman — a third-generation Korean born in Japan — has brought a lawsuit against an employer who distributed anti-Korean propaganda in the office. It’s one of the first trials for the country’s new laws against racist and hateful speech.
Photographer: Noriko Hayashi/BloombergHate-Speech Case Forces Japan to Confront Workplace Racism
Do the country’s new anti-bias measures have any teeth?
Distributing handouts is an unusual way for executives to communicate with employees in the 21st century. The messages on some of Fuji Corp.’s materials were even more retrograde. One featured a screenshot from a nationalistic YouTube video with comments below, including one that read “Die zainichi,” a reference to second- and third-generation Koreans living in Japan. Several of the documents referred to Korean comfort women — women and girls trafficked for work in Japan’s military brothels during World War II — as “whores.”
One employee in particular, a third-generation zainichi whose name has been withheld by Bloomberg and other media over concerns about future harassment, grew increasingly uncomfortable. She asked the Osaka home-builder to stop the leafleting. It didn’t and, in 2015, she sued.