8 September 2014, a little after noon. A FamilyMart on a corner in Ibaraki City, on the northern edge of Osaka — the most ordinary kind of shop, doing the most ordinary kind of Monday lunch rush.
Two men are inside, and by the time anyone's phone comes out, one of them has already told the store's assistant manager exactly what happens next: he is going to kneel on the floor between the register and the rice-ball shelf, forehead down, and apologize.
He does. Someone asks whether he's really planning to apologize "empty-handed." He hands over six cartons of cigarettes — ¥26,700 worth — while the phone keeps recording. Then, instead of deleting the footage, the men upload it themselves.
The posture has a name — 土下座 (dogeza), full prostration, forehead to the floor — and in ordinary life almost nobody ever performs it. It survives mainly as ceremony: a company president bowing at a podium after a scandal, a historical drama's petitioner groveling before a lord. Reserving a gesture that extreme for the gravest occasions is exactly what makes forcing a convenience store clerk into it over a pack of cigarettes recognizable, instantly, as something gone wrong — not a complaint any more, but a shakedown wearing a complaint's clothes.
What the men filmed was not evidence someone else caught them in. They posted it themselves, to show it off, in the tradition of a specific corner of Japanese internet culture nicknamed バカッター — roughly "idiot-Twitter" — where people upload proof of their own bad behaviour because the laugh outweighs, in the moment, the thought that the footage keeps forever. It did. Within weeks the video had a nickname of its own, police had two suspects, and the following year an Osaka court convicted both men of extortion and handed down two-year prison sentences, suspended for four.
The case did something bigger than put two men on probation: it gave a name to a pattern retail workers had been quietly enduring for years. カスハラ — a contraction of the English "customer harassment" — spread through everyday Japanese soon after, and unions went looking for how common the underlying behaviour actually was. A 2017 survey of retail and service-sector unions covering more than 50,000 workers found 74% had experienced it, and nine in ten of those said it had caused them real stress. A repeat survey in 2024 put the figure at 46.8% — an improvement on 2020, and still nearly one worker in two.
For most of that decade there was no law to point at, only a norm — and a phrase people leaned on to justify breaking it: お客様は神様です, "the customer is a god." Tokyo finally moved first, passing Japan's first prefectural ordinance to explicitly name and ban kasuhara, in force since April 2025. It carries no fine and no criminal charge; what it does is put the words "no person shall engage in customer harassment" into law, so that a manager refusing a demand is no longer just being difficult — he is complying with an ordinance. The national version follows in exactly one week: from 1 October 2026, a revised labor law makes every employer in the country legally obligated to have a kasuhara-prevention policy, not merely encouraged to write one.
The phrase everyone quoted for sixty years to justify demanding a dogeza was never about customers at all. In 1961, a radio host asked the enka singer Haruo Minami what he thought of that day's audience. He answered that they were "like" gods — meaning that before he sang, he had to clear his mind the same way you would before praying at a shrine, so that he could give the crowd his absolute best. It was a note to himself about discipline, not a decree about anyone's rights. Comedians and corporate sales trainers stripped out the "like" and the context over the following decades until it read as an entitlement instead of a confession of stage fright, and by 2014 a stranger could stand in a convenience store and use a paraphrase of a dead singer's nerves to make another stranger kneel on the floor. Japan didn't need a new philosophy to fix that. It needed to remember the old one.
- The phrase most often blamed for kasuhara culture, お客様は神様です ("the customer is a god"), is a distortion of a 1961 remark by the enka singer Haruo Minami, who said audiences were "like" gods to describe the mindset he needed before performing — not an instruction aimed at customers.
- A 2017 survey of retail and service-sector labor unions covering more than 50,000 members found 74% had experienced customer harassment, with about nine in ten of them reporting real psychological stress from it; a 2024 repeat survey put the figure at 46.8%, nine points lower than 2020 but still close to one worker in two.
- Tokyo's Customer Harassment Prevention Ordinance, in force since April 2025, was Japan's first law of its kind — and it carries no penalty. The country's first nationwide version, a revision to the Labor Policy Comprehensive Promotion Act requiring every employer to adopt kasuhara-prevention measures, takes effect on 1 October 2026.