Tom Hodgkinson on the ubiquitous Japanese phrase that’s now seen as a form of bullying

Back in the day, the joke in the Idler office was that we would secretly launch a rival title called Go For It! This magazine would celebrate the virtues of hard work, long hours, getting ahead, smashing the competition, high fives, whooping, team bonding weekends, and offer tips on political manoeuvring to help you get ahead in the mega-corps. 

In Japan, our magazine would have been called Ganbatte!, for that is the multi-purpose and oft-used Japanese term for encouraging team or work mates to work harder, do better. Hence Competitive Dad might shout ganbatte at his son on the football field. It could also be translated as “do your best”, “good luck”, “persevere” or “endure”. It’s the kind of thing, then, that Kendall Roy would say in a meeting with the mistaken idea that he was motivating his “team”.

But the expression ganbatte, according to a piece in the FT today, has new enemies. A hit TV show called Extremely Inappropriate has a female executive complaining to HR about a boss using the word ganbatte. She says it’s an example of “power harassment”, a form of bullying.

Bullying in the workplace has become a problem in Japan, so much so that new laws for large and medium-sized businesses were introduced in 2022 to combat it. Corporate culture in general had gone a bit crazy: in 2018, the government brought in new laws to limit the length of the working day and encourage workers to take their holidays, following concerns about karoshi, or “death from overwork”.

Susumu Oda, director of the beautifully named “Work and Life Harmonisation Division” at the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, said: “It has been recognised that gaining time off work is important to refresh employees both mentally and physically.”

This all looks like a good thing at first sight. More idling. It’s surely a victory for those of us who have always recoiled from heartiness, authoritarian behaviour and not taking your holiday entitlement.

But will ganbatte simply be replaced by new and more insidious forms of coercion? We remember Aldous Huxley’s line in his introduction to Brave New World: “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

Live well,
Tom

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