The cultural acceptance of whistleblowers is a sensitive and even volatile topic that typically is avoided, particularly when discussing the issue in public. Yet, societal and historical forces continue to powerfully influence the treatment of people who take it upon themselves to expose corruption. Unless these forces are confronted and addressed, witnesses will continue to suffer serious reprisals.
In Japan, where loyalty-based hierarchies long have stunted employees’ efforts to raise concerns within the workplace, this touchy subject finally is being discussed out in the open.
Daisuke Asaoka, a management and corporate governance professor at Kyoto and Meiji universities, takes an honest look at the topic on the heels of reforms to Japan’s whistleblower protection law.
The “collectivist culture” in Japan “exalts the importance of loyalty and tolerates unfair but loyal behavior over the individualistic culture of the United States,” Asaoka writes in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
Asaoka describes Japan’s corporate culture as a “collectivist community, where all ranks, from top management to newly hired graduates, share a destiny within a tightly bound, meticulous, longitudinal order and enjoy internal promotion under a lifetime employment system.”
Whistleblowing, he says, is beginning to depart from this common notion. “That corporate misdeeds, some hidden for decades, are being revealed by whistleblowers in blue-chip Japanese firms suggests...
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