Hoshino Sen’ichi managed three professional baseball teams, the Chunichi Dragons, the Hanshin Tigers and the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles. As a manager, he was known for tekken seisai, punishment with the iron fist. Bunshun wrote that in those years this was not treated as a problem and seemed to be encouraged by society as a whole.
Hoshino himself said he used his fists “until the Chunichi years. Not at Hanshin. The people around me had become too noisy.”
In June 2017, the mayor of Akashi, Izumi Fusaho, berated a senior city official in charge of a stalled road-widening project. One building owner had not yet agreed to sell. Izumi told the official to burn it down, to set it on fire and get arrested.
The remarks came to light in January 2019. At a press conference, Izumi admitted them and said he had already apologized to the official. He resigned and won the mayoral by-election on March 17, 2019.
Sashidegamashii yō desu ga (差し出がましいようですが): it may be forward of me, but. A cushion phrase before offering advice that may overstep. Sen’etsu nagara (僭越ながら): presumptuous as it is. Used when stating an opinion in front of superiors.
Gyaku pawahara (逆パワハラ): reverse power harassment. Harassment of a boss by subordinates.
In October 2024, the consulting firm Scholar Consult surveyed 5,161 employees of companies with 100 or more staff. In one-on-one meetings with their boss, 55.6 percent of general employees and 70 percent of managers said they could speak candidly. In the everyday workplace, 53.2 percent of general staff and 62.6 percent of managers said they could speak candidly to their boss.
In the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, senior soldiers punished recruits privately. The encyclopedia Imidas writes that the military authorities officially did not allow such private punishment but in practice tolerated it.
“If the navy had the stick, the army had the binta,” a hard slap across the face with an open hand. The navy’s stick carried slogans such as gunjin seishin chūnyū bō, the stick for injecting military spirit.
In Tsuribaka Nisshi (Diary of a Fishing Fool), a manga that began in 1979 and became a film series from 1988, Hamasaki Densuke, called Hama-chan, is an ordinary employee of Suzuki Construction. The company’s president, Suzuki Ichinosuke, called Sū-san, is his fishing companion.
A TV Tokyo drama version sums up their relationship: “At the company, new employee and president. At fishing, master and apprentice.”
A profile of Honda Sōichirō, the founder of Honda, on the site nippon.com describes him at work: he allowed no compromise, and he would strike people. It sums him up as a warm back and a strict hand.
In July 2015, a third-party committee published its report on Toshiba’s accounting. According to press reports of its findings, the president had shown the heads of the company’s divisions profit targets called charenji, challenge, and had pressed them hard to meet them.
The committee found that at Toshiba “there was a corporate culture in which one could not go against the wishes of one’s superiors.”
Sakura Sōgorō was a village headman of the early Edo period. According to the legend, he appealed directly to the shogun against his lord’s heavy taxes, and he was executed for it.
In 1851, his story was staged at the Nakamura-za theater in Edo as the play Higashiyama Sakura Sōshi. He became the best-known gimin, a man who gave his life for the people. Little about him is historically certain, and some have argued that he never existed.