Pawa-hara (パワハラ) • noun • (pah-wah hah-rah)
Definition: Power Harassment
Origin: Japanese
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One of the peculiar obstacles of articulating the importance of language is that many people, without overtly admitting so, believe that words are essentially meaningless and fall a distant second behind actions.
Phrases such as “Talk is cheap” pervade our society, and due to this, people want to ignore the impact of words and jump directly to the actions that derive from them. There is an absurdity to this perspective because words exist as both meaningless sounds and the source of our transformational actions. Obviously, it is impossible to survive via this doublethink, but due to our prioritization of actions ahead of words, American society yearns to engage and believe in meaningless actions as the key to progress.
As I worked on my first book, The Crime Without A Name, many people liked the ideas and language in it but what they truly desired was a list of actions outlining the things they should do next. They wanted a concise explanation of the language and a detailed list of the actions, rather than understanding that the practice of using the language itself would cultivate the very actions they were seeking.
When my work began to focus on language and I formulated the word ethnocide, I did not anticipate how difficult it would be for others to prioritize language ahead of action. Yet one of the beautiful aspects of the word ethnocide is that Raphael Lemkin via the coining of the word genocide has already demonstrated how new words can create life-changing actions.
Before Lemkin coined genocide and ethnocide in 1944, international law had no legal standard for preventing or condemning atrocities such as the Holocaust. To fill this linguistic void, Lemkin coined both words and then created a legal foundation to outlaw an action that had previously been undefined. The existence of the word genocide shows how words can reshape the world, and we believe that the creation of the word ethnocide can also result in positive society-level change as we combat this previously unnamed atrocity.
This week’s word, pawa-hara, is a modern example of how one word can transform a society and remake a society’s laws for the better.
Power Harassment
The term pawa-hara was coined in 2003 by Japanese social psychologist Yasuko Okada to describe the pervasive abuses of power, or power harassment, occurring in Japanese workplaces. After this word was invented, Japanese society has actively worked to combat pawa-hara through both changing social norms and creating new laws.
In 2017, a Japanese female politician was recorded berating one of her male subordinates and screaming at him “you should die!” This recording erupted into a scandal and the politician resigned and also checked herself into a hospital to treat her “unstable mental condition.”
This incident was not described via sexist, westernized language such as “hysterical” where the blame allegedly resides within some biological flaw exclusive to women. Instead, it was rightfully understood as a person of power abusing their power and harming others in the process. This person does not deserve the power bestowed upon them by the public.
The scope of pawa-hara impacts every aspect of work culture and does not necessarily fall along a patriarchal gender divide. Men and women can equally commit pawa-hara.
Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has actively worked to prevent pawa-hara and has broken it into six different categories: “physical abuse, mental or emotional abuse, deliberately isolating an individual in the workplace, overworking an employee, giving an employee work that is far below their skill level or scope, and infringement of privacy by asking personal questions not pertinent to work.”
As an American, a fascinating aspect of how Japan defines pawa-hara resides in the realization that many of the categorized abuses have long been commonplace in American jobs.
Burnout in the workplace has long been rampant in America, and in many professions, regularly working overtime has been the expected norm. Additionally, many American jobs expect salaried employees to work more than 40 hours a week without the expectation of overtime compensation. Likewise, employees are often expected to perform menial tasks for their bosses despite the work being far below their skill level. Mental and emotional abuse is also unfortunately common in American workplaces, and it is normal for employers to pry too far into one’s private life.
Over the last decades, as the Japanese economy has become increasingly westernized, a toxic work culture has also emerged where people work an unsustainable amount of hours. Over this time period, abuses of power have run rampant, and in order to combat this problem, Japan created a new word to define this previously unnamed problem and has used this language to empower people to act differently and create laws to combat the problem.
In 2019, the Power Harassment Prevention Act was introduced in the Japanese National Diet (their bicameral national legislature) and it officially came into effect on June 1, 2020. The law also expanded the definition of pawa-hara to include: “remarks and behavior of people taking advantage of their superior positions in the workplace that exceed what is necessary and appropriate for the conduct of business, thereby harming the working environment of employees.”
In 2020, engaging in pawa-hara has become a criminal act and before 2003 the word did not even exist.
Ethnocide and Abuse of Power
Japan has long been a hierarchical society, so it is difficult to conclude whether a westernized, ethnocidal relationship to power has increased the use of pawa-hara throughout the country. Potentially, pawa-hara may have always existed in Japan and in fact, western notions of individualism and female empowerment may have given Japanese women the power to create the language to describe previously unnamed abuses that have long been within Japanese culture.
Likewise, it could be a combination of the two where westernized ideas are both the problem and the solution.
However, as we focus on pawa-hara, we must recognize the abuses of power that exist within our own societies and explore the potential root causes of the problem along with their potential solutions. In the United States, ethnocide creates a cultural norm where abuses of power are expected and largely condoned.
Ethnocide depends on both mauvaise foi and the master-slave dialectic, and this combination creates a social norm devoid of both trust and responsibility.
With mauvaise foi the expectation is of a bad faith relationship where people expect to be deceived, and normalized deception equates to an erosion of trust. When you apply mauvaise foi to the power dynamics of workplace culture, you create an environment where people anticipate that they cannot trust their bosses, their peers, or their subordinates. Everyone is out for themselves, and office culture can quickly devolve into a treacherous sea of power dynamics and petty battles. If you cannot trust anyone around you, survival quickly becomes a quest to dominate everything that you encounter.
When you add in the master-slave dialectic to this hostile and untrusting environment, you create an environment ripe with abuse.
In the master-slave dialectic, which has been ingrained in American culture since the advent of slavery in the Americas, the master has all of the power and none of the responsibility and the slave has all of the responsibility and none of the power. If something bad happens then it is the slave’s or the subordinate’s fault regardless of who should actually be to blame. Likewise, if something good happens, the master will take all of the credit even if he had nothing to do with it.
In the South, a slave owner would proudly take credit for a plentiful harvest despite never engaging in any of the labor to grow the crops. If a slave attempts to escape, a slave owner never blames himself for creating a hell on earth in which anyone would attempt to escape, but instead would find a way to blame the slave by describing their attempted escape as being caused by some inherent laziness or stupidity.
Within an ethnocidal society, people aspire to obtain power so that they can abuse others, engage in irresponsible actions without repercussions, and exist apart from and protected from the untrustworthy, mauvaise foi that exists to take away their power. And once that power is gone, they then could become the subordinate who is now vulnerable to sustained abuse from the powerful.
This is the dystopian fabric of an ethnocidal society, and the best way to combat these systemic problems that pervade every aspect of our lives is to create new language to accurately define the problem and then create the structures and actions to combat and progress beyond this harmful way of life.
Event in Washington, DC!
Our good friends at Stable Arts are hosting a screening and Q&A tomorrow, June 7 at 6pm about #GlitchFeminism. Below is more info about the event and you can RSVP here.
#GLITCHFEMINISM (2018) is a video essay and performative lecture based on Legacy Russell’s research toward her recent publication Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso Books, 2020), a vital new chapter in cyberfeminism. Glitch Feminism explores the relationship between gender, technology and identity. In this urgent manifesto, Russell reveals the many ways that the glitch performs and transforms: how it refuses, throws shade, ghosts, encrypt, mobilises and survives. Russell argues that we need to embrace the glitch in order to break down the binaries and limitations that define gender, race, sexuality.