Tokyo passes nation's first customer harassment ordinance

In a first for the nation, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government passed an ordinance to protect workers from customer harassment — aggressive behavior and unreasonable demands from customers toward staffers — at a metropolitan assembly session held on Friday.

The order is to be implemented from April next year, with plans for the metropolitan government to develop more detailed guidelines, but it does not include any criminal punishment.

“The main philosophy (of the ordinance) is mutual respect between workers and customers,” Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike said at a news conference on Friday. “We plan for it to function effectively in ensuring a comfortable consumer experience as well as continuation of business and will work out the specific contents of the guidelines to ensure that they can be properly implemented on the ground.”

Aggressive acts toward front-line workers have become a growing problem over the last couple of years in the service industry. In some cases, customers berate staff and demand that they get on their knees to apologize for minor mistakes. Others make unreasonable requests, and if these are not met, they react with verbal or even physical abuse.

The media has kept a close watch on the issue amid reports of individuals being diagnosed with mental disorders, and even some cases of suicide linked to the harassment.

For instance, earlier this year, the labor standards inspection office officially recognized the 2020 suicide in Chiba Prefecture of an employee of a housing manufacturer, who was in his 20s, as being caused by customer harassment.

The issue is widespread, with a June survey conducted by UA Zensen, a federation of labor unions in the Japanese retail and service industries, finding that out of 33,000 respondents, 46.8% had experienced some form of customer harassment within the past two years.

According to the survey, the top two most common forms of harassment that workers experienced were being forced to apologize to customers and unreasonable requests to exchange products or services.

The ordinance declares that customer harassment “not only harms workers, but affects the environment in which goods and services are provided and, therefore, must be dealt with not only by individual businesses, but also by society as a whole." It also calls on the city to create an environment where customers and workers respect each other on equal footing.

It further notes that reasonable requests contribute to business and service improvements and, therefore, the rights of customers must also continue to be respected.

Going forward, the metropolitan government is looking to specify acts that would be disallowed under the order and devise guidelines on how the industry should go about handling customer harassment.

The ordinance had been discussed in the metropolitan assembly since around a year ago.

As the issue is widespread around the nation, other local governments, in areas such as Hokkaido and Aichi Prefecture, are pushing to implement similar ordinances.