Hyogo Gov. Saito Takes Power Harassment Prevention Training Program; Learns about Anger Management, Whistleblower Act

The Yomiuri Shimbun

16:38 JST, May 13, 2025

Hyogo Gov. Motohiko Saito, along with about 120 prefectural government officials, participated in a training course Monday about preventing workplace harassment, also called power harassment, and learn about the whistleblower protection system.

The governor attended the training program, in which he was also taught anger management, for more than four hours. The prefectural government’s financial department had asked the governor to implement the course after the department conducted a probe on Saito last December over internal accusations of his alleged acts of power harassment.

Initially, Saito expressed his intention to receive the training program by the end of March, but it had been postponed due to his public duties and difficulty in arranging the instructors’ schedules.

The training course comprised three sessions focusing on “management of organizations and measures to prevent instances of power harassment,” “a system to protect whistleblowers for public interests” and “a system to protect personal information.” Only the beginning portions of each session was shown to the press.

Saito and 33 senior officials of the prefectural government took the course at the prefectural government office and 88 other officials took the course online at another location.

Koshin Nakagawa, a representative of Nakagawa Comprehensive Legal Office, gave a lecture during the first session, according to documents from the training course and interviews with prefectural government officials.

Nakagawa, an expert in regulatory compliance, talked about how to create workplaces with open atmospheres where power harassment does not occur. Nakagawa presented methods for anger management such as “waiting the six seconds during which anger is believed to reach its peak by taking deep breaths or other means.”

During the second session, Prof. Shogo Hino of Shukutoku University, an expert in the whistleblower protection system, said: “The system is to quickly find wrongdoing in organizations. It must be prohibited at all costs to try to identify or search for whistleblowers.”

After the course, Saito told reporters: “It was a very fruitful training course. I want to utilize what I learned for managing organizations.

Concerning the system to protect whistleblowers, “I was taught that it is important to make circumstances in which officials can easily notify of problems internally,” Saito said.

But about the prefectural government’s alleged problematic response to a whistleblower in the past, the governor reiterated his insistence that the response was “appropriate.”