Speaking Out Has High Cost
Whistle-blowers often face retaliation by their employers in Japan, but a new push to protect insiders follows recent corporate scandals.

By MARK MAGNIER, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

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"Japanese don't like to be different from others. They also tend to hide unpleasant things from outsiders. So whistle-blowing has met with suspicion on both counts."

 
-- Etsuko Kawada, legislator
TOKYO -- In 1973, salesman Hiroaki Kushioka discovered evidence linking his employer to price-fixing. He complained to his boss, a vice president of the package delivery company, but was told to keep quiet. He raised the issue with other company officials but was told not to rock the boat.

Frustrated, he turned to the media and government regulators. This, finally, created a stir. It also angered the company and landed Kushioka in employment hell, he says. As soon as the media attention died down, the company took its revenge.

In 1975, his employer, Tonami Transportation, transferred him to a tiny, remote subsidiary. For the next 27 years, Kushioka says, he was humiliated, badgered and bullied. The company stuck him in a room 9 feet square without a working telephone and made him weed lawns, shovel snow and arrange cushions. His pay remained virtually unchanged for more than two decades.

"I felt terrible humiliation," he says.

Tonami disputes Kushioka's version of events and blames his poor performance. But early this year, Kushioka filed a lawsuit against Tonami seeking an official apology and $415,000 in damages and forgone wages.

Kushioka's stubborn endurance and willingness to challenge Tonami legally have made him something of a model for a once-unthinkable movement: a growing push to protect whistle-blowers, in a country where loyalty and group harmony have long trumped notions of social justice.

Kushioka might still be languishing unnoticed in the corporate wilderness if a parade of recent scandals hadn't shocked many Japanese and undermined their faith in institutions that helped rebuild the nation after World War II.

Tainted-blood scandals in the early 1980s at the Health Ministry, wining and dining abuses in the 1990s at the Finance Ministry, and slush fund improprieties at the Foreign Ministry over the past two years have convinced Japanese that many elite bureaucrats were more interested in feathering their nests than safeguarding the public interest.

On other fronts, the auto industry, long a symbol of Japanese pride, was tarnished in 2000 after Mitsubishi Motors was discovered hiding customer complaints, thereby masking potentially deadly defects.

Especially shocking to many Japanese were revelations of crooked dealings in the food industry. This, after all, is a nation weaned on the belief that its farm products and inspection standards were among the world's best. Snow Brand, one of Japan's largest dairy producers, was accused of selling tainted milk after thousands of its consumers fell ill in 2000. And the meat-packing industry was caught this year mislabeling beef to boost profit margins and collect government handouts in the wake of a "mad cow" scandal.

A common theme in most of the cases was insiders speaking out. A telephone caller tipped regulators to look in a Mitsubishi Motors locker for thousands of long-hidden customer complaints. A supplier helped break the meat scandals. Other leakers laid bare the host of ministry scandals.

Still, activists remain concerned that Japan's cultural bias against those who speak out will undermine efforts to foster a vibrant whistle-blowing culture and secure greater legal protection against retaliation.

Most whistle-blowers don't stick around long enough to match the 27 years of exile and hounding that Kushioka says he endured. Even so, they face witch hunts, bullying and pariah treatment as long as they stay. The treatment here is arguably more devastating to people's sense of worth and self-esteem than in other countries, experts say, given Japan's long historical isolation and unique traditions.

Since its samurai days, Japan has stressed loyalty at almost any cost—whether to one's feudal lord, employer or ministry. Those who broke this code frequently were labeled traitors and sent away, a terrible fate in a group-oriented culture.

"Traditionally, betrayal is the biggest crime in Japan, almost worse than murder," says Tetsuo Yamaori, a religious scholar. "The price was mura hachibu, or exile from the village."

Group Harmony Prized

Closely related is a long-standing taboo against confrontation, challenging authority or disturbing the wa, or group harmony.

"Japanese don't like to be different from others. They also tend to hide unpleasant things from outsiders," says Etsuko Kawada, an independent lawmaker. "So whistle-blowing has met with suspicion on both counts."

Kawada should know. Her hemophiliac son, Ryuhei, is HIV-positive because the Health Ministry did not screen the nation's blood supply in the early 1980s, despite knowing the risks.

"If only someone in the ministry had spoken out, it would have saved so many people's lives," she says. "We need to change the system."

Another factor behind Japan's traditionally jaundiced eye toward whistle-blowers, analysts believe, is its view of right and wrong. Historically, Japan's concept of justice has been more malleable and dependent on situation and context, compared with the West's focus on objective rules.

"We're taught to respect those above us in the hierarchy, not to act on absolute standards," says Kazuko Miyamoto, a consumer advocate and author of the book "The Era of Whistle-Blowing."

That said, globalization, Japan's decade-long economic slide and growing suspicion of authority increasingly are spurring a far more sympathetic view toward those who disclose wrongdoing. A poll by the Consumer Research Institute in 2000 found that 45.1% of those surveyed supported whistle-blowing in the public interest, although 28% worried that it could spur betrayal.

In-house loyalty has also eroded in tandem with lifetime employment as middle-aged "salary men"—with extensive knowledge of corporate impropriety—are squeezed out of jobs and seek revenge.

"The Internet is also a growing force," says Iwao Taka, a professor with Tokyo's Reitaku University and a business ethics specialist. "Japan now has over 10,000 sites disclosing what's going on inside companies."

The social tussle over whether whistle-blowers are Benedict Arnolds or public saviors is frequently played out in a not-in-my-backyard approach.

For many Japanese, whistle-blowing is exemplary as long as it isn't in their company and doesn't jeopardize their jobs. Fresh in many minds is the food unit of Snow Brand, which went bankrupt after shoppers shunned the firm.

Business Lobby Vocal

The biggest opposition to whistle-blower protection laws—which might ensure, for instance, that people who speak out aren't denied promotions or forced out of their jobs—comes from Japan's mainstream business community—and many in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. One company executive compared whistle-blowing to "telling on one's parents."

"Even if you create new laws, it doesn't solve the problem," says Mitsuru Shinozaki, a spokesman with the umbrella Federation of Economic Organizations. "Bullying isn't welcome, of course. But another law isn't going to stop it."

This view is tempered by other voices, however, arguing that whistle-blowing, when channeled through in-house hotlines and corporate compliance programs, provides indispensable alarm bells.

"Companies that change with the times have a better chance of competing and surviving," says Tadashi Kunihiro, a corporate attorney. "Just look at Snow Brand. It doesn't exist anymore."

Other opponents fear broader social damage. "Bringing Western ideas of whistle-blowing will accelerate the breakdown of Japanese society," religious scholar Yamaori says. "Japanese will lose their basic trust in one another, leading to chaos."

Working on Legislation

Lawmakers are now exchanging draft proposals and studying U.S. and British legal models. Some, such as members of the Democratic Party of Japan and the Social Democratic Party, favor a narrowly focused law initially covering only government workers, given industry's strong opposition.

Others, such as lawmaker Kawada, want as broad and comprehensive an approach as possible. Early betting is that Japan will see a civil service whistle-blower law passed within a year or two, followed later by a broader corporate law.

Japan already has one whistle-blower law on the books, covering the nuclear power industry, although it's never been tested. The statute was enacted in 2000 after an accident at a nuclear fuel-processing plant 80 miles northeast of Tokyo revealed that workers had for years transferred radioactive material using stainless steel buckets without speaking out.

A review of the 1968 Basic Consumer Protection Law now underway also is expected to strengthen whistle-blower safeguards in the food and medical areas.

Most Japanese seem to favor Britain's approach, which requires whistle-blowers to first exhaust internal complaint channels before going public. This contrasts with the more blanket protection afforded under the 1989 U.S. Whistleblower Protection Act—a law inspired by the 1986 space shuttle Challenger explosion, in which it turned out that an engineer had complained of defects and been fired.

Another legitimate Japanese concern is the greater difficulty that Japanese whistle-blowers face finding another job compared with their counterparts in the U.S. or Europe, where blacklisting is illegal and job-hopping more common.

"In Japan, people need to blow their whistles more quietly than in the U.S.," says Tetsuro Kuroda, director general of the Freedom of Information Citizens Center.

Whistle-blower Kushioka had a quarter-century in his tiny office to think about whether he'd done the right thing by going public.

"I was naive and didn't realize at first how much they'd retaliate against me," he says. "When I told the company I was going to the prosecutor's office, the pressure really got worse."

Asked about Kushioka's price-fixing allegations, Tonami officials would say only that "shortcuts were taken." Prosecutors launched an investigation at the time, but Japan was far more tolerant of monopolistic behavior in the mid-1970s than it is now, and the case was quietly dropped. Tonami denies any bullying and blames Kushioka's derailed career on his argumentative nature and poor leadership skills.

"His unique personality is the issue here, not whistle-blowing or human rights," says Noriaki Murata, a Tonami planning manager.

According to Kushioka, however, fellow employees would call his mother intimating that he had no pride and should quit his meaningless job.

Company officials also pressured his brother and father-in-law, who worked elsewhere, to persuade him to quit.

And a board member harassed Kushioka deep into the night hoping to exhaust him into leaving the company, he says.

Another Tonami board member asked colleagues to slip Kushioka some drinks and bait him into punching a co-worker, thereby giving the company cause for dismissal. The plot failed when the colleagues refused.

Perhaps the most heavy-handed effort involved phone calls and visits from someone identifying himself as part of the yakuza, or Japanese organized crime.

The man first tried to bribe Kushioka with $25,000 to quit, then sought to intimidate him, Kushioka says.

"If you don't resign, younger yakuza may stage a traffic accident, and the police would never know you were murdered," Kushioka recalls him saying.

Kushioka refused to give up, however, despite the enormous strain on those around him and on his mental health.

His entire family urged him to resign, and his mother even pleaded with his wife to divorce "my stupid son."

Early this year, faced with five more years until mandatory retirement, an increasingly sympathetic social environment and little to lose, he filed his suit against the company. The case is now working its way through the courts.

"Even though it won't help me now, Japan really needs a whistle-blower protection law," he says. "I'm determined to fight on, no matter how long it takes. I just hope I can win this case and create a good precedent for others."

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Hisako Ueno in The Times' Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.
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