Harassment at work in a japanese restaurant (Not a thread about being threatened or harrassed at Joytalk by the Hiroto Tsuchiya)

Harassment at work in a japanese restaurant (self.japanlife)

submitted 1 day ago * by kohitime

Hi everyone ! My boyfriend is currently in trouble and I don’t know what advices to give him.

My boyfriend is japanese, born and raised in Japan. After 1 year at a very good cooking school, he just began to work at a very nice gastronomical restaurant in Tokyo. He has been working there as a part-time job for 1 year before and even done an internship for 2 weeks and everything was going well.

However it changed quickly since he began to be a full-time worker. As he is on a 3-months trials, he is supposed to work only 8 hours per day (but in fact he is working 10). His superior began to treat him differently, first as he didn’t apply to a “self-training agreement”. Basically this agreement is to work 4 or 5 hours more everyday without being paid more. But my boyfriend hasn’t been the only one that didn’t apply to this (only one worker applied and it’s probably because she is dating the superior). Still he is the only one to be treated that bad : he is not assigned lot of works, treated in a rude way, etc. The superior also told to some coworkers in the back of my bf that “they are promising and should not hang out with him”. It kinda of look as a beginning of harassment.

There is one boss above the superior in the hierarchy but he doesn’t really seem to care about what happens to his workers. The superior is also known as having pushed many workers to quit in the past.

My bf doesn’t know what to do. He’s afraid to quit and to go to other restaurant where the harassment is similar or worst. He is so disappointed (his work was really great until some weeks ago) that he is even considering to quit cooking (his dream is to be a japanese chef) and works in an office. Do you have any advices on what he could do ?

EDIT about the following comment : I do not mean that other Japanese can not be extravert. Just for some reason, some others seems to not like him and my bf thinks it’s because he’s extravert. He is often also mistaking as a foreigner.

*I just wanted that even if my bf is japanese, he has a very different kind of “being”. He is very social, not shy, very funny and do not want to “live for work” which pushes very often others japanese to dislike him. On the other side, he’s one of the kindest people i know and is very serious about work (when he likes it).