Hello! 28 female foreigner living and working in Tokyo as international student support (translation, immigrations documents, life support, school administration etc) in a small language school outside the big 23 wards. I like my job, I love working in education and helping students, I made a couple of very close friends in my workplace and I feel capable and learned a lot working here.
However, this company is, to put it simply, a black company. But what I wanted to ask with this post isn't even about my overwork not being paid and workload being stressful to the point of tears from multiple coworkers. I'm debating on leaving this company because of my boss' normalized sexual and power harassment.
It's a small school, which means our boss (65yo male) makes 100% of the hands on decisions on everyday problems, and higher than him there's only the school owner which is an extremely rich woman that comes a couple times a week to make very questionable decisions that we have to learn to deal with. Well, ever since I started working here the male boss is very open about talking about my appearance very casually, how cute and pretty I am, how he put my table in front of him because "it's easier to work looking at you", how X student is doing this or that because they are in love with me, etc. I just kind of laugh it off and our (all female and 1 gay) team all kind of understands it's very uncomfortable for me and not an advantage to be "the boss' pet".
However, ever since the owner started coming more and more to the office, the amount of comments towards me got higher. "K was only hired because Boss thinks she's pretty", "what do you even do?"(and proceed to leave and not let me explain my 789798 responsabilities), "I wonder what we should do with the new hires, since Boss will be jealous if I put them next to you!", "What even is your relationship with Boss?" etc etc. She also comments on my clothes, hair and body. Everything in front of everyone and with no space at all to voice anything back (everyone that says anything back to her about her decisions gets a "if you're unhappy you can just leave")
My boss and her constantly fight because of administrative conflicts, and I feel like I ended up being dragged inside of this. I am very competent and somehow juggle a larger workload than my peers during busy document season, but recently it all became even more than ever about my appearance and I feel like everything is so pointless now. Why am I killing myself to make everything work out perfectly and even with absolutely 0 mistakes all my hard work gets ignored and all I get back are comments that imply I'm useless and that i'm sleeping my way into this job.
I'm sorry about the vent, but I'm really just wondering if this is an unfortunately "normal" part of corporate job as a young woman. My partner of course gets worried and says none of this is normal, but there's nothing I can do about it in this company. We have no HR and no higher up to complain. But I wonder if it'll just be the same on other companies, and at least here I have friends and we don't do overwork outside the twice a year busy seasons.
by BabyDeerMeat