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I don't know anything about Japanese culture, so I can't offer any comments of value. But I'll blast out a few unconnected thoughts that I think are pertinent here.
I have seen dozens of examples of new / first-time managers seemingly forget everything they ever learned about social behavior. I think the pressure of "being in charge" can do strange things to people (even if they are simply in charge of making sure everyone does what they're already doing). In the American The Office (which I despise) a major cornerstone of the plot and characters is how the "Boss", Michael Scott, is a cringe machine who cannot lead his employees effectively and cannot be-friend them socially. Power dynamics (which is a term I despise) complicate relationships. If it's hard for an individual to navigate social relationships already, being a boss can be a bridge too far.
Men and women can absolutely work together, but it won't be the equity-and-inclusion utopia that the HR bots believe in. This has nothing to do with sexual harassment or office romance, and everything to do with group decision making styles. Women seek to build complete group consensus, Men are more prone to making decisions and then getting the group behind them. Women will indirectly criticize and use covert tactics to challenge, Men are more direct and will "disagree and commit." The problem has become that the HR bots have deemed all of that male behavior verboten; toxic, hostile, etc. What has taken it's place is a laundering of classic male group dynamics to be more "acceptable" to female styles of communication. The HR bots collect their rent by commanding large salaries to rubber stamp these goofy interactions - and, of course, to defend the behavior of executives no matter how outrageous.
Sexual harassment is often a "know it when I see it" transgression. It's also, unfortunately, a very relative thing. There is a meme about this. We can culture war about that (and I'm sure we will). My specific question would be - what's the best way to deal with a delusion person who thinks that any social attention is sexual harassment? A given employee - male or female - simply believes that any passing kind comment is an overt indication of romantic intent. How do you deal with this? Can you imagine sitting Bob or Alice down and saying something like "Phil from accounting doesn't want to fuck you." That in and of itself would be sexual harassment. Try a different approach, "Bob/Alice, you've submitted 5 sexual harassment complaints this year. All were investigated and none were substantiated. Maybe take a step back?" Again - wouldn't this turn into some sort of complaint?
My weak submission is simply to keep at-will employment as strong as possible. If an employee is just causing problems (sexual harassment or otherwise), leadership should be permitted to fire them easily. But even that's not necessarily a clean end. I think there was a post on here about wrongful-termination suits being 90% fantastic bullshit and 10% "holy hell, fucking sue that company into oblivion." HR beyond the grave but in reverse.
Since you mentioned The Office, one of my favourite moments in the whole series is the episode where Toby leads the office in sexual harassment training. Michael's boorish friend Todd Packer visits the office and spends the episode making crude comments about everyone and everything. By the end of the episode when Packer is directly insulting Phyllis's appearance, Michael finally seems to grasp that Packer's behaviour is unacceptable and tells him so - and then, being Michael, he takes it too far and starts lavishing praise on how gorgeous Phyllis is, to the point of claiming to have an erection.
It's easy to imagine the high-concept writer's pitch for this episode: "Michael is so aggressively opposed to sexual harassment in the workplace that he inadvertently ends up committing an even more extreme kind of sexual harassment". But it does say something about how sweepingly these policies are written. Explicitly telling your colleague that you want to fuck them (or implying it) is sexual harassment; explicitly telling your colleague that you don't want to fuck them (or implying it) is also sexual harassment. Take it to its logical conclusion and it suggests that every employee should have zero opinion on their colleagues' attractiveness (or lack thereof) whatsoever - perhaps we could issue everyone burqas to expedite the process? From my understanding, the Anglosphere is something of an outlier in this regard - in Italy, jokes, banter and playful flirting are seen as an ordinary and desirable part of office culture. I know it can be taken too far and there are severe downsides to that approach, but the modern Anglosphere approach isn't costless either, and when you think about how deracinated, sexless (in the literal and figurative senses) and adversarial modern Anglosphere working culture is, it's hard not to think that something lovely was lost along the way. Not too long ago, playful banter between two colleagues which eventually escalates into a passionate kiss at the Christmas party was one of the predominant routes to nuptials - now it has largely fallen by the wayside, in favour of the "superior" option of the Tinder algorithm doing the legwork for us.
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I disagree with your final paragraph. We don't want the female worker in the OP to be able to easily get the other guy fired. American CEOs sided with BLM and started enforcing stronger antiwhite quotas. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-26/corporate-america-kept-its-promise-to-hire-more-people-of-color
It is easier for higher ups to be ideologically captured, and they cannot be trusted as a class with power to do whatever they want. Of course, the system is such that there are pressures in that direction, including from the goverment.
There should be all sorts of pressures to allow people to be fired for valid reasons, and not allow them to be fired for invalid reasons like those who have been fired for being insufficiently left wing. The concept of frivolous complaints and people being politically correct troublemakers should be sufficiently common and they will be less inclined to be that. Female coworkers claiming harassment over BS like this case, should count as bad behavior.
At the same time, it is fair for female workers not to be groped for example and to be able to make complaints about that. I dunno how common that is in Japanese corporations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chikan_(body_contact)
And in an environment of strict legal equality, women are granted this power.
It's only a solvable problem in a totalitarian system, where the computer actually knows what he-said and she-said (and where this is already the case, usually when the text message logs enter the court record, the case gets thrown out... and then the laws get changed to make text messages inadmissible), but if we had a totalitarian system equality wouldn't be a thing anyway.
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The fact that she's a temp may give them some room to just not renew her--but then she may consider this the reason (which it probably would be) and see that as actionable, i.e. "They didn't want me back because I pointed out their harassment" or similar. I am not actually sure how it will play out.
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