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The story
It’s been reported that Hyogo Prefectural Police Academy has shifted away from its old style of screaming instruction, moving instead toward a more “supportive” approach that includes exchange diaries between cadets and instructors — sparking discussion on 5ch’s Newsflash+ board.
The thread saw a clash between worried voices asking “can cadets coddled like this really hold their own against violent criminals and yakuza?” and defenders arguing “strict training and power harassment are two different things” and “harassment isn’t education” — with the discussion spiraling out into debates about Gen Z and comparisons with policing overseas.
Until just a few years ago, instructors’ angry shouts echoed through the halls of Japan’s police academies. But this is now the “compliance era.” At Hyogo Prefectural Police Academy, which shifted to a more “supportive” style of instruction last year, instructors have been struggling with how to convey the harsh realities of the job without crossing the line into harassment. On graduation day, what were the instructors’ final words to their students?
■ “You’re the only one who can’t do it!” — Has the once shout-filled police academy really changed that much!?
On July 31, Hyogo Prefectural Police Academy held its graduation ceremony. The graduates will now head into the field, carrying the heavy responsibility of protecting the peace of their communities.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Can these softies actually handle criminals?
Yakuza are scary, you know?
Shouldn't they be used to getting yelled at?
The yakuza switched to a no-shouting policy way before the cops did, just to secure recruits.
When they're actually throwing their weight around, I bet they'll do it with a totally cool, straight face.
Can they really go toe-to-toe with violent criminals out in the field?
Congratulations, you've just built a wrongful-conviction machine.
In cases that actually went to court, they really did call in the parents and grill them hard, telling them to make their kid quit.
Apparently it's standard practice for police to bring parents in voluntarily and interrogate them as if the father “manufactured a defective product” and the mother “gave birth to industrial waste.”
So the parents fight tooth and nail for their own honor too, which is apparently why so many of these cases fail to settle and end up going all the way to the Supreme Court.
The term “power harassment” (パワハラ/pawahara) itself is a made-in-Japan English word (wasei-eigo).
It's a coinage made up by a private HR consulting firm — only used in Japan.
America doesn't have anything like that.
“Sexual harassment,” though, actually came from America.
Then again, over there you can get fired way more easily.
On the job, cops deal with people who couldn't care less about “compliance.”
No.
The police are an organization that destroys the lives of people who did nothing wrong.
“I was harassed by a violent criminal, so I'm reporting it to the Labor Standards Office.”
Is the classic tough-guy interrogation shout “This is Osaka, ya hear!” (a stereotypical hard-nosed Osaka-cop catchphrase) going to become a dying tradition?
Guess it'll turn into a softer “This is Osaka, okay?” instead.
They've already been hiring bad apples like crazy, it's bad!
I walked into a certain police headquarters and there was some thug
sprawled out on the lobby bench with his shoes still on, like he owned the place,
and nobody even said anything to him.
They're being completely disrespected.
You can really feel the staffing shortage.
But aren't today's thugs less rough around the edges than they used to be too?
Power harassment is nothing but personal emotion.
It's totally possible to run strict training that isn't just someone venting their feelings by tormenting people — the fact that police can't manage that is just plain stupid.
Whether something counts as harassment
is decided by the “victim,” you know.
American guy: “Power harassment? What's that? We don't have anything like that in America.”
as long as they're prepared for the fact that if everyone they harass quits and nobody sticks around, and the organization can't function because of the staffing shortage,
that's on the harassers and the brass themselves, self-inflicted.
That said, unlike a normal company, police have the special condition of having to deal with violent criminals who are ready to fight — that makes it tricky.
And as a kind of dry run for that, if someone's spirit breaks just from an instructor being tough on them, they honestly aren't cut out to be a cop.
Foreigner: “What is this ‘power harassment'? Another Japanese-made word? Japan really is its own little Galápagos, huh.”
What actually gets evaluated is just the headcount at enrollment, so it doesn't matter if people quit afterward.
There are plenty of people who want to become cops anyway.
Can they really stand up against outlaws?
Going forward, police are probably going to get more incompetent — like firing their guns the second they get scared, or needing ten officers to surround one raving addict and still not being able to subdue him…
Go ahead and give them strict training and education.
But harassment isn't training or education.
I was shocked at how soft it's gotten.
If the North Korean army came marching south, they'd probably just get scared and run.
Hey now, if they don't nurture them carefully the police force will shrink and we'll end up living in Gotham City lol
https://newsdig.ismcdn.jp/mwimgs/1/8/750w/img_1824bf0d8873f45b8983b2f909e41949244995.jpg
＞More like finding the right way to flip their switch
＞Some students even cry the first time they handle a handgun
＞Instructor: “I won't lose to these young guys yet” — worked hard so as not to be outdone
Sounds like it's the instructors who have it rough now lol
Pretty soon nobody's going to want that job either
Line three — back in the day, a student like that would've been expelled.
Well, cop academy (“poli-ko,” slangy shorthand for the police) isn't about raising an elite, so I guess anybody'll do.
Check out the intensity of Osaka Prefectural Police raiding a yakuza office!
Background and Key Points
Japan’s prefectural police forces each run their own residential training academy, and recruits typically spend six months to a year living under an instructor’s direct supervision before their first assignment — a structure inherited from a pre-war and postwar culture that treated harsh discipline as inseparable from readiness for the job. What’s changed is not the academy system itself but the legal and cultural climate around it: Japan’s Power Harassment Prevention Act, phased in for large employers in 2020 and extended to smaller organizations in 2022, obliges institutions — including police, which had long been treated as a special case — to formally document and prevent abusive supervision. Hyogo’s shift to “exchange diaries” and softer instruction is one prefecture’s local response to that broader legal pressure, not an isolated policy experiment.
The thread’s real fault line wasn’t over whether harassment is bad — nearly everyone agreed on that — but over whether shouting-based training was ever actually about harassment, or whether it was functioning as a proxy stress test for a job that involves confronting armed and violent people. Posters defending the reform insisted strict training and personal venting are distinguishable in principle; skeptics doubted any institution under compliance pressure could tell the two apart in practice.
What the thread misses is the demographic pressure behind this: Japan’s shrinking pool of working-age applicants means academies can no longer afford high dropout rates, making retention as much a driver of reform as any harassment complaint. It’s also worth noting, against one poster’s claim, that “sexual harassment” did originate in the US — only “power harassment” is a Japan-specific coinage.
*This article is composed as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Newsflash+) thread “[Reiwa Era] Instructors Struggle at ‘No Power Harassment’ Police Academy — A Shift Away from the Old ‘Shouting,’ Plus Exchange Diaries — ‘Speak Up Loud and Give It Your All! Fight!’”.
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