Japan’s bullying bosses

AS HONDA SOICHIRO built his company from a small producer of engines to attach to bicycles into a global carmaking giant, he developed a reputation as a talented engineer and a maverick executive. He was also known to be an exacting boss, even a violent one. “When he got mad, he blindly reached for anything lying around, and started throwing whatever was in reach randomly at people,” one former executive later recalled. Such fiery tempers remain all too common among Japanese managers. A Japanese psychologist even coined a term to describe the particular abuse that the country’s supervisors pile upon some of their employees: pawahara, or power harassment.