Distributing handouts is an unusual way for executives to communicate with employees in the 21st century. The messages on some of Fuji Corp.’s materials were even more retrograde. One featured a screenshot from a nationalistic YouTube video with comments below, including one that read "Die Zainichi,” a reference to second- and third-generation Koreans living in Japan. Several of the documents referred to Korean "comfort women" — women who suffered under Japan’s military brothel system before and during World War II — as "whores.”
One employee in particular, a third-generation Zainichi whose name has been withheld by Bloomberg and other media over concerns about future harassment, grew increasingly uncomfortable. She asked the Osaka home-builder to stop the leafleting. It didn’t and, in 2015, she sued.
Japanese law doesn't have much precedent to punish racial discrimination. The country was the 145th party to the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1995, and the employee’s case holds that Fuji and its chairman, Mitsuo Imai, went against the international pact as well as the country’s own labor law. When Japan’s legislature, the Diet, passed the Hate Speech Act in 2016, the employee and her lawyers alleged that the language in the handouts also met the country’s new category of "unjust discriminatory speech and words.”
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