Why More Japanese Service Employees Are Hiding Their Names

Unseen Japan
4 min readSep 28, 2024

A rising awareness of customer harassment and stalking in Japan means more employees are hiding their identities.

Picture: Canva

By Jay Andrew Allen

An increasing number of companies and government agencies are giving their employees permission to change their name tags, keeping their real identities secret. What’s driving this change? A spike in so-called “customer harassment.”

Almost 1 in 2 service employees face “customer harassment”

Japan has a reputation abroad for being a kind, gentle, and polite country. While there’s a grain of truth here, at the end of the day, it’s a nation of people. And some people will always try and take advantage of others.

In Japan, some customers use the traditional notion in business that “the customer is god” to take advantage of service employees. This can include pressuring employees for discounts, demanding that an employee who somehow did them wrong bow down in apology, or even stalking or committing assault.

In Japanese, this is called “customer harassment” (カスタマーハラスメント), or “kasu-hara”…

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