The 1991 Senate confirmation hearings for the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court focused on allegations of workplace misconduct. The misconduct was broadly referred to as sexual harassment and, for many US American viewers, the term was a new one. But sexual harassment was not a new term in 1991; the OED (2026) lists the first written use of the term in the April 19, 1971 edition of Yale Daily News. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s human resource managers worked to codify the parameters of sexual harassment in both the United States and the United Kingdom – and probably many other places, as well.
One of those other places was Japan and, when faced with introducing new guidelines into the workplace, Japanese managers chose to simply borrow the English word as sekushyuaru harasumento into Japanese. Like many other English loanwords that enjoy widespread use in Japanese, the full term is usually shortened to sekuhara. The shortened form uses the first two moraFootnote 1 of each word – seku from sekushyaru ‘sexual’ and hara from harasumento ‘harassment’ – to form sekuhara ‘sexual harassment’.
The process of producing a short form is common in Japanese, and it is typically applied to titles of institutions, like universities. For example, Toukyou Daigaku ‘Tokyo University’ is shortened to Toudai. Long English loanwords are also frequently shortened in this way, like masu komyunikeeshyon ‘mass communication’ to masukomi, paasonaru konpyuutaa ‘personal computer’ to pasokon or ea kondishyonaa ‘air conditioner’ to eakon. The rules for shortening long words also apply to words that blend Japanese and English lexemes. The English loanword ookesutora ‘orchestra’ when combined with Japanese kara ‘empty’ can be shortened to karaoke, a word whose short form has been reintroduced to English. The shortening of these loanwords demonstrates how thoroughly the words have been borrowed into Japanese; once they are fully borrowed into the language, the normal rules of Japanese word formation can transform them into short forms.
But the Englishness of sekuhara is still easily recovered by most Japanese speakers, who will generally acknowledge that the short form is used in lieu of the longer sekushyuaru harasumento. The term sekushyuaru harasumento was probably first borrowed as a single two-word expression from English into Japanese, but the individual elements – sekushyuaru and harasumento – are also available for new word formation.
This is exactly what has happened with the word harasumento, or hara. Recently, I learned about two human resource management websites (Badzukiru 2026; Jinjer Co. Ltd 2024) that describe different types of workplace hara and guidelines for identifying and preventing harassment.Footnote 2 Given that the websites’ descriptions of hara are for Japanese workplace infractions, some of them are quite predictable, like jenhara (from jenda ‘gender’) and tekuhara (from tekunorojii ‘technology’). The meaning of these two harassment types is relatively easy to grasp; both websites describe jenhara ‘gender harassment’ as the use of common gender stereotypes to describe a co-worker and tekuhara ‘technology harassment’ as criticism of a co-worker for not knowing how to use a piece of office technology. Similarly, rimohara (from rimooto waaku ‘remote work’) is specific to online working environments where, for example, a company may require a worker to keep their camera on during working hours even though there is no need for the camera to be turned on.
Coincidentally, two of the shortened words described above – karaoke and eakon ‘air conditioner’ – can be used to describe types of hara. Karahara (from karaoke) describes the practice of pressuring workers to sing karaoke songs when they are unwilling to do so, and eahara (from eakon ‘air conditioner’) can be used to describe environments where the office is kept too cool or too hot. One of the more interesting uses of an English loanword is sumehara (from sumeru ‘smell’); this type of harassment could describe producing a bad smell that disrupts the workplace or, interestingly, commenting on a bad smell that should otherwise be ignored.
One of the more esoteric and difficult to translate types of hara is zekuhara, which Jinjer Co., Ltd. (2024) describes as a woman pressuring a man to propose marriage. The derivation comes from the popular bridal magazine Zexy (but written in katakana imaginatively as ゼクシィ Zekushixi to resemble セクシー sekushii ‘sexy’). The origin of zekuhara comes from the practice of leaving a copy of the bridal magazine Zexy out for a man to see as a passive suggestion of the desire to marry.
There are also several hara that are peculiar to the culture of Japanese workplaces, and English is a productive contributor in at least three of them. Aruhara (from arukooru ‘alcohol’) describes the pressure that one worker (especially a manager or boss) puts on another to drink alcohol when they are out together for dinner or drinks after work. Nuuhara (from nuudoru ‘noodle’) can be used to describe the sound of slurping noodles in spaces where colleagues eat together. Although arukooru ‘alcohol’ is a commonly used Japanese word, the English loanword nuudoru ‘noodle’ is somewhat less common. The use of English noodle, however, is also quite understandable because it serves as a general term for all types of noodles in Japanese. By combining English noodle with hara Japanese speakers avoid the need to specify the type of noodle dish (e.g., ramen, udon, soba, somen, spaghetti, etc.) whose slurps may offend co-workers. A very interesting use of an English loanword for one of these new types of hara is found in the term enhara (from enjyoi ‘enjoy’). Enhara describes colleagues who emphatically profess their enjoyment of the workplace, and, like other hara, this is usually enacted by senior colleagues. Okahara (from the Japanese word okashi ‘candy’) is one of the few hara terms that uses a Japanese element alongside hara. Okahara describes the deliberate withholding of communal treats or candy (typically brought to the office as souvenirs when a colleague returns from leave) from specific individuals.
The last hara that I would like to introduce (and there are many in these two websites that I have not introduced here) also uses a Japanese word blended with hara. The Japanese word oware ‘finish’ or ‘end’ can be applied to many things: the end of a movie, end of life, end of a discussion, etc. But owahara refers to pressure on job candidates to end or finish their job search. Every year Japanese companies search for new employees from among college students who are about to graduate. Sometimes a company will offer a job, but ask the jobseeker to first end their job search and give up any other forthcoming offers from other companies. This is a form of ‘cherry picking’ and both websites describe owahara as a type of harassment.
It is difficult to generalize about the role of English in Japan based upon this introductory analysis of hara. The original loanword from English gave the Japanese language a lexeme that could easily be creatively exploited. The hara described in these HR websites could also arguably be described by the Japanese noun ijime ‘bullying’. And ijime could certainly be used for many of the types of hara described in the websites. But the introduction of harasumento and its shortened form hara gives Japanese a specialised vocabulary for describing bullying as it specifically takes place in the workplace.
In his closing chapter of the second edition of the monumental volume The Other Tongue: English across Cultures, Kachru (Reference Kachru and Kachru1992, 360) describes two possible outcomes of contact with English: ‘What are the processes and implications of the nativization of English, and Englishization of local languages?’ [emphasis added]. While world Englishes scholars have considered the nativization of English in great detail, I hope that this brief survey of Japanese hara will remind us to also consider the ubiquitous effect of Englishization.
In this issue of English Today we bring readers two research articles and one note. Alfred Tsang, Tong King Lee, and Wei Li examine the effect of humorous language play within Hong Kong’s Kongish Daily in relation to the development of a Hong Kong identity. Yoko Iyeiri considers the historical and contemporary status of the verb-complement prevent from V-ing in British English. Finally, David C. S. Li responds in the ongoing discussion (or, more accurately, debate) about the naming of English varieties.
This issue also includes three shorter articles. Joonhee Kim, Daniel R. Isbell, and Kitaek Kim propose measures to introduce standards from the Common European Framework of Reference to English grammar instruction in Korea. Jia Li, Bin Ai, Hanxiao Song, and Yubei Han explore the use of English as a romantic register in Chinese online games. Finally, Laurie Bauer explores the challenges related to teaching English stress patterns.
Three book reviews of recently published edited works round out this issue. Mohamed Hafiz reviews Andrew J. Moody’s The Oxford Handbook of Southeast Asian Englishes. Pasan Athapaththu reviews Jerry Won Lee and Sofia Rüdiger’s Entangled Englishes. Finally, Marii Abdeljaoued reviews Kay Gallagher’s World Englishes in Arab Gulf States.
