Why Japanese People Don’t Criticize Upward

Not only “authority.” Something wider too — jōge kankei — and harder to translate.

A Swiss friend — we’ve spent years working together on projects in Japan, and he’s become one of my closest friends — asked me a question right after I told him I’d started a blog. It sounded simple: “Why don’t Japanese people like criticism of the people above them at work?”

I started answering with “authority” — rank, expertise, whoever’s officially in charge. That’s part of the answer. But I stopped halfway through the sentence. In Japan, the people you’re not supposed to criticize upward aren’t only the ones with formal power over you. The category is wider than that, and harder to translate.

Authority Is Part of It

Authority is part of the answer. Teachers, doctors, bosses, companies, titles, prestigious schools — all of these carry genuine weight in Japan. That part of the picture isn’t wrong.

But authority alone doesn’t fully explain the question. A senpai with a year more on the job isn’t always more capable. A boss isn’t always right. And yet, more often than not, the same caution shows up anyway — the same reluctance to say anything directly upward.

What’s doing more of the work is a structure called jōge kankei (上下関係) — literally an “upper-lower relationship.” In Japan, “upper” can be wider than boss, expertise, or formal power. Someone can sit above you even if they’re not your manager, even if they’re clearly not more competent than you, even if they hold no formal authority over your work at all — simply because they’re senpai, because they’re older, because they joined the group earlier. The seat, not the résumé, is doing the work.

Foreign readers may hear this as criticism of authority. That’s not wrong. It’s incomplete. Jōge kankei overlaps with authority — a boss is usually above you in both senses — but it applies more broadly, and in places where formal authority provides no real explanation. This is probably one of the hardest parts of Japanese hierarchy for outsiders to fully absorb, because the English word “authority” keeps quietly substituting itself back in.

It’s a Relationship Problem, Not a Content Problem

The problem is not simply who has authority. The problem is who is seen as above or below in the relationship. In a system built mainly around authority, criticism gets judged on one axis: is it correct? In a system built around jōge kankei, there’s a second axis running underneath it: is the person saying this allowed to say it, from where they’re standing?

Ue kara mesen does not simply mean “being arrogant.” It means sounding as if you are speaking from a higher position than the relationship allows.

You may have no formal power. You may not be older, senior, or responsible for the other person. But if your words sound like you are evaluating, correcting, or judging them from above, it can be received as ue kara mesen.

This is why upward criticism can feel dangerous in Japan. If someone below criticizes someone above, the problem is not only the content. The speaker is also seen as taking a position the relationship has not given them.

Hierarchy Is Learned Before Work

If jōge kankei isn’t mainly about competence, the natural question is where the reflex to respect it comes from. Most of it gets installed long before the first job, somewhere most people wouldn’t even file under “hierarchy” at the time.

School does some of it: the senpai-kohai structure in club activities (bukatsu), where a third-year’s word isn’t really up for discussion regardless of whether the third-year is any good at the sport. Part-time jobs do more of it — a first part-time job, often around fifteen or sixteen, run by an assistant manager who is, in absolute terms, not very impressive, but who still gets the deference owed to someone standing on the upper side of the relationship. Teachers and older students reinforce it in smaller, more invisible ways — who gets corrected in front of the class and who doesn’t, who’s allowed to disagree with the teacher and who’s expected to simply absorb it.

By the time someone enters a company, the lesson isn’t new information. It’s closer to a long-installed reflex: there’s an upper side and a lower side, and the lower side doesn’t correct the upper side directly, regardless of who’s actually right.

The Cost of Disagreeing Upward

The reflex holds because disagreeing upward tends to cost something, and the cost gets learned early enough that most people stop noticing they’re paying it.

In a club, contradicting a senpai can mean a worse position, colder treatment, being quietly frozen out of the group that actually matters. In a part-time job, it can mean fewer shifts, a worse shift, a write-up over something that would have been ignored from someone else. None of this requires the senpai or the manager to be cruel. The cost is built into the structure, not into any individual’s personality.

This isn’t unique to Japan — bullying senpai and nervous kohai exist in workplaces everywhere, and pawahara (power harassment) is simply the legal category for when it gets bad enough to qualify. What may be more distinctly Japanese is how early the lesson gets installed, and how many small, unremarkable chances there are to learn it before it has anything to do with a company at all.

Boys and Girls May Learn It Differently

If part of this is learned early, it isn’t learned identically by everyone, and it shouldn’t be told as one story.

For boys, the lesson often arrives loudly: orders, scolding, physical drills, the specific discipline of a sports club where a senior’s word isn’t discussed. In some clubs that discipline tips into something rougher — hazing, occasionally real violence, treated for years as ordinary training rather than abuse.

For girls, the same lesson can arrive almost silently: through exclusion, through reputation, through who gets invited and who doesn’t, through senior approval that can be withdrawn without explanation. Being disliked. Being quietly moved outside a group. No one has to raise their voice. My observations on this part are more limited. I’m a man, so much of what I know comes from listening rather than living it.

The form is different enough that each side can fail to recognize the other’s version as the same thing. But underneath, the content is close: if someone sits above you in the relationship, disagreement has a price, and you’ll likely learn what that price is before you’re old enough to vote.

The Problem Isn’t That Japanese People Have No Opinions

None of this means the criticism doesn’t exist. It means it doesn’t happen where you’re looking.

Japanese employees criticize bosses, teachers, and senpai constantly — just rarely in the room, rarely to the person’s face, rarely at the moment it would change anything. It happens after, over drinks, in a hallway, in a message to someone at the same level. Some of it gets loaded into the decision before the meeting even starts, through the quiet one-on-one consultations known as nemawashi. By the time the formal meeting happens, the disagreement has often already done its work somewhere else, and the meeting just confirms what was already settled.

The opinion was never missing. It just never went near the upper seat directly.

What I Can Explain, and What I Still Can’t

So his question has an answer. Japanese people criticize upward less freely because jōge kankei is wider than formal authority — and once someone occupies the upper side of it, criticism stops being judged only on its content and starts being judged on its direction. Authority is part of why the upper side carries weight. But it’s not the whole reason. That part gets learned early, in places that have nothing to do with work yet, and it costs something to ignore once it’s installed.

What I still can’t fully explain is smaller, but it doesn’t go away: why jōge kankei itself carries so much weight — not just where genuine authority or real expertise explains it, but in the quiet, ordinary case where the person above you is simply someone who arrived a year earlier. I have a name for the pattern. I don’t yet have the mechanism. That part stays open.

All of the above is one Japanese person’s interpretation. Treat it accordingly.