Japan's New Customer Harassment Law - Employer of Record and Global Employment Outsourcing Services in Japan

What employers must do before October 2026

What it is, in short

Starting October 1, 2026, Japanese employers have a specific legal duty to protect workers from harassment by customers, not just from coworkers or managers. Until now, the mandatory harassment-prevention framework covered power harassment and sexual harassment between people inside the company. A customer who repeatedly threatened, insulted, or abused staff sat in a gap: bad behavior, but not something the law forced an employer to act on.

A 2025 amendment to Japan’s Act on Comprehensive Promotion of Labor Measures (労働施策の総合的な推進並びに労働者の雇用の安定及び職業生活の充実等に関する法律), passed June 4, 2025 and published in the Official Gazette June 11, 2025, closes that gap by inserting a new Article 33, Paragraph 1:

職場において行われる顧客、取引の相手方、施設の利用者その他の当該事業主の行う事業に関係を有する者の言動であって、その雇用する労働者が従事する業務の性質その他の事情に照らして社会通念上許容される範囲を超えたもの
— Act on Comprehensive Promotion of Labor Measures, Article 33, Paragraph 1

Conduct by a customer, business counterparty, facility user, or other person connected to the employer’s business, occurring in the workplace, which — in light of the nature of the duties performed by the employed worker and other circumstances — exceeds the bounds of what is socially permissible.

Notably, the definition explicitly includes “取引の相手方”, business counterparties, not just retail customers, so this covers harassment from a vendor or client company’s staff toward your employee, not only end consumers. A genuine complaint, made within reasonable bounds, doesn’t count. This is aimed at conduct that crosses the line, not customers who are simply unhappy. And it applies to every employer with even one employee, no size exemption.

Article 33, Paragraph 2 separately prohibits retaliation: an employer cannot dismiss or otherwise disadvantage a worker for reporting an incident or cooperating with an investigation. Paragraph 4 requires the Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare to issue an implementing guideline, the one discussed below.

A worked example: what happens when the employer does nothing

Here’s how this plays out in practice, illustrated with a representative, not an actual, case.

A retail employee is targeted repeatedly by the same customer over several weeks: shouting, name-calling in front of other customers, demanding refunds outside store policy, showing up specifically to confront that employee. The employee reports it to their manager more than once. Nothing happens, no one talks to the customer, no policy gets invoked, no support is offered. Eventually the stress becomes unmanageable and the employee goes on medical leave with a diagnosed stress-related condition.

This is where the employer’s inaction stops being just a management failure and starts being a legal and financial problem, on two separate tracks.

Track one: workers’ compensation. Since September 1, 2023, Japan’s official criteria for recognizing work-caused psychiatric injury (認定基準, MHLW Labour Standards Bureau Director Notification 基発0901第2号) has listed severe, repeated customer harassment as a qualifying trigger Item 27 of Attached Table 1, the “Occupational Psychological Stress Evaluation Table”:

心理的負荷としては「中」程度の迷惑行為を受けた場合であって、会社に相談しても又は会社が迷惑行為を把握していても適切な対応がなく、改善がなされなかった
— 心理的負荷による精神障害の認定基準, 別表１, 項目27, 基発0901第2号（令和5年9月1日）

Even where the harassment itself was rated only “moderate” psychological burden, if the worker reported it to the company or the company was otherwise aware of it and no appropriate response followed, with no improvement.

This is one of the listed examples of conduct rated “strong” the severity threshold needed for the injury to be officially recognized as work-related. In practice, this means the employer’s silence in our example isn’t a side issue; it’s the specific fact that makes the case qualify. Once recognized, workers’ compensation insurance covers full medical treatment costs and roughly 80% of lost wages during recovery, with no need to prove the employer was at fault — it’s a no-fault system funded by employer-paid insurance premiums.

Track two: a lawsuit against the employer. Workers’ compensation does not pay damages for pain and suffering. To recover that, the employee has to separately sue the employer for breaching its duty of care toward employee safety a well-established basis for Japanese workplace injury claims. That claim requires showing the employer knew, or should have known, and failed to act. An employer with no policy, no complaint channel, and no response plan now a specific legal requirement as of October 2026 is far easier to prove negligent than one operating in a legal grey area. Comparable harassment cases have produced damages awards well into eight figures (yen) where a company’s response was found inadequate.

So the practical sequence for an abused employee is: workers’ compensation first, for medical costs and partial wage replacement, with no fault to prove; then a separate civil claim against the employer for everything that doesn’t cover, built directly on the employer’s failure to act once it knew.

The three things the law actually requires

The Ministry’s implementing guideline, published February 26, 2026, breaks the employer’s obligation into three concrete pieces:

A stated policy. The company has to say, in writing and communicated to staff, that it won’t tolerate customer harassment and will act to protect employees.

A consultation channel. Somewhere a worker can actually report an incident, with someone responsible for handling it this can be the same channel already required for workplace and sexual harassment, extended to cover customer conduct.

A response and deterrence plan. Since the offending party is outside the company, the toolkit looks different from an internal case: reporting to police, a formal warning letter to the customer, refusing further service or barring entry within legal limits, and, in serious cases, a court injunction.

The duty applies to every employer, and non-compliance is enforced the same way Japan’s existing harassment laws are enforced: the labor bureau first gives informal advice, then a formal written recommendation if nothing changes, and in the most persistent cases, can publish the company’s name.

The part that matters most for EOR clients and dispatched staff

If your worker is in Japan through an EOR or licensed dispatch arrangement, and it’s the client’s own customer doing the harassing, the question is who’s actually on the hook.

For workers placed under licensed dispatch, Japan’s Worker Dispatch Act already extends the harassment-prevention duty to the host company, the client in parallel with the employer of record. That provision already governs workplace harassment, and the same extension applies to the new customer-harassment duty. The client can’t treat this as solely the employer of record’s problem; they carry an independent legal duty of their own.

Where a placement isn’t structured as licensed dispatch, that specific extension doesn’t automatically attach, though the underlying duty on the actual employer never disappears. That gap is exactly why this belongs explicitly in a Master Services Agreement, rather than being left to whichever legal mechanism happens to apply to a given placement structure.

What to check before October

Does your harassment policy, or your EOR provider’s, cover customer and third-party conduct, or only coworker and management conduct?
Is there one consultation channel a placed worker actually knows how to use?
If a client’s customer mistreats your placed worker, does your contract with the client say what happens next?

This article draws on the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s published legislative summary, implementing guideline, and psychiatric-injury recognition criteria, along with Japan’s harassment-prevention enforcement framework. The worked example is illustrative, not an account of an actual case. This article is provided for general informational purposes, is not legal advice, and is not directed at any specific company or arrangement. Companies evaluating workforce protections in Japan should consult qualified Japanese employment counsel regarding their specific facts.

Japan’s New Customer Harassment Law