OSAKA (TR) – It’s been a week since the Osaka-Kansai Expo opened. As of Sunday, the total number of visitors, including those involved, has exceeded 700,000. It is expected that even more people will visit during Golden Week holiday period, which starts this weekend.
The event aims to take a look at what the future holds. But one incident of apparent “customer harassment” that took place last week is firmly rooted in the present.
At around 4:00 p.m. on April 17, a man began yelling a second man believed to be a security guard near the west gate of the Expo site.
“The man was yelling angrily. He shouted something like ‘get down on your knees’ at the security guard,” said a person who captured the incident on video, according to Fuji News Network (Apr. 21). “I can’t say for sure what happened between them, but I heard a loud voice say, ‘Get down on your knees.’ And the guard got down on his knees. There was another guard next to me, and while he was yelling, we were saying, ‘This is customer harassment.'”
Kasuhara
“Customer harassment” describes disruptive behavior by customers toward customer service workers. Written as kasuhara in Japanese, such behavior includes customers swearing, making unreasonable demands or carrying out violence.
In 2017, trade union UA Zensen published a study whereby it was revealed that 70 percent of its 50,000 members had been victims of harassment of some kind.
Three years ago, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare published a manual for businesses on how to deal with problematic customers. The following year, the Hotel Business Act was amended to give hoteliers the power to not accept business form poorly behaving guests.
“They did look apologetic”
In the case of the security guard, the male customer demanded that he carry out dogeza, meaning to prostrate oneself on the ground. Not long after he issued the command, his family arrived at the scene.
“I don’t know if the family apologized, but they did look apologetic,” the person who shot the clip said.
Whether the incident is actually customer harassment depends on exactly what the man said to the security guard before he got down on his knees, says lawyer Masaki Kamei.
“For example, it cannot be ruled out that the security guard voluntarily did so in an attempt to apologize more than necessary,” Kamei said. “So, it is necessary to prove that the dogeza was the result of some kind of verbal harassment or physical action.”
