Sex Harassment Ruling a First for Japan : Courts: Woman is awarded $12,400. The judgment recognizes verbal abuse in workplace as illegal.

TOKYO —  A judge Thursday awarded a woman $12,400 in a ruling that for the first time recognized verbal sexual harassment as illegal in the Japanese workplace.

“Although the term sexual harassment was not used, the judge recognized that sexual discrimination is illegal,” said Ikuko Tsujimoto, lawyer for the plaintiff.

The case was widely called the first sexual harassment suit in Japan, a country where women traditionally have remained silent about unwelcome physical actions and verbal abuse from men. The concept remains so alien that the English phrase is commonly used to describe it, along with the explanation “sexually unpleasant statements” in Japanese.

Judges in the last two years awarded two other women $8,460 and $22,560 in compensation for physical actions by male co-workers, but Thursday’s ruling in Fukuoka District Court was the first to deal with verbal abuse.

“Today’s judgment opens a new path for women throughout the country who are suffering the same kind of sexual harassment,” said the plaintiff in a statement issued to reporters in Fukuoka.

The identities of the plaintiff and the defendants were concealed in an attempt to avoid public harassment that they feared the dispute would induce.

The 34-year-old woman, employed in 1985 as a magazine editor, filed suit against her employer, a publishing company in Fukuoka, and a 40-year-old senior editor, charging that for nearly two years he regularly told other workers that she was promiscuous, “liked to drink and flirt with men” and was “having an affair.” When she complained to a managing director of the firm, he accused her of “disrupting the working place” and asked her to quit.

The trouble with the senior editor, the plaintiff said, began after an argument over working hours. She resigned in 1988 and filed the suit a year later.

Although evening newspapers in Tokyo gave banner treatment to the ruling, most media coverage ridiculed the woman’s complaint.

After the decision, Kazunari Minamitani, lawyer for the defendants, said in Fukuoka that “a certain extent of friction is inevitable when men and women work together. I think women who decide to participate in society should be prepared to show a certain extent of forbearance.”

Minamitani called the ruling “extremely severe” and said the defendants would decide later whether to appeal.

Judge Takashi Kawamoto found the senior editor guilty of “denigrating the plaintiff’s status at work and worsening (her) working environment,” forcing her to resign. “Use of comments about the plaintiff’s private life centered upon relations with the opposite sex to settle a dispute at work is clearly an illegal action,” he ruled.

Kawamoto also ruled that the company acted illegally by attempting to “adjust workplace relationships” with unilateral action against the female plaintiff.