An ex-Bandai employee’s lawsuit alleges discrimination and racism in the work place. According to My News LA, Tony Le, a Vietnamese-American, isn’t only suing Bandai America and Bandai Namco Holdings USA, but also some of his former bosses over alleged discrimination, harassment and wrongful termination, among other claims.
The suit, My News LA reports, states that Le worked in the US as the company’s senior manager in financial planning, but soon after being hired in 2010, he alleges issues of discrimination against non-Japanese employees.
Here’s My News LA:
Le and other employees who were not Japanese were subjected to verbal abuse in Japanese, condescending gestures and “obscene laughter,” the suit alleges.
In 2013, Bandai’s former CEO, Matsuo Masayaka, told Le, “All you Americans are so stupid and don’t know how to run a business”; “If I could I would fire all the Americans”; and “Japan should have bombed Pearl Harbour again,” the suit alleges.
Other supervisors told Le he was a “stupid American” for enrolling in USC’s MBA program, according to his lawsuit.
…He alleges he also was excluded from company meetings and dinners in which only Japanese employees were invited.
Le also alleges he was denied information necessary to do his job and says he was told to “remain silent” after bringing it up with human resources. The suit says he found out his position had been eliminated last March, claiming he was the only person working in financial planning in the company’s US branch. The suit alleges he was terminated due to discrimination.
Japanese site Sankei News contacted Bandai Namco Holdings for comment, but the company declined because of the lawsuit. Kotaku is reaching out to Bandai Namco’s US branch for comment.
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2 responses to “Former Employee Sues Bandai, Alleges Racism”
Poor dude, it sounds like he is of Asian descent – if so that would make him even more discriminated against by the Japanese. If you are white you get the best treatment (for a foreigner). If you are black or Asian then YMMV and good luck to you.
Makes me wonder. People can sometimes say the strangest things when they think they can’t be understood. College I lived in at Uni had a fair number of Korean students. One of the white kids actually spoke Korean, was studying it to be a translator.
One day in the cafeteria, while our group sat near the Korean kids’ table, eating relatively quietly. The Koreans were laughing and joking amongst themselves. For some reason the translator wannabe blushed and got a real unhappy look on his face. He looked over to them and raised his voice a bit, saying something in Korean, and the exchange students fell silent, to a man, ashen-faced. Almost in unison, they got up, took their trays and went to another table, where they spent the rest of the time speaking lowly and shooting dirty looks over at the translator.
We all looked puzzled and asked what the hell that was about, but he wouldn’t say what he’d said or what he’d heard. He just grumbled quietly, “They were saying some pretty uncomplimentary things about us. I let them know that I’d understood what they said.”