山田：木村先生、S教授にセクハラのいやがらせを受けているそうですね。
木村：ええ、毎晩、失礼な電話をかけてこられて悩んでいるんです。
Sekuhara
Yamada: Kimura-sensei, S-kyooju ni sekuhara no iyagarase wo ukete iru soo desune.
Kimura: Ee, maiban, shitsurei na denwa wo kakete korarete nayande iru n' desu.
Yamada: I heard that Professor S. has been sexually harassing you.
Kimura: Yes. Every evening I get these offensive telephone calls. I don't know what to do about it.
Sekuhara is a shortened form of the expression "sexual harassment" (although in the way it is used in Japanese it can also mean "sexual discrimination") , These are many examples in Japanese of words which have been borrowed from foreign languages and taken into Japanese in a shortened form like this. "Personal computer" becomes pasocon; "radio cassette player" becomes rajikase, and so on. This is no doubt because the original English words, if transcribed completely into kata-kana, would be too long. However, I wonder who it was that first used the expression sekuhara.
Let me tell you about an acquaintance of mine, a teacher called Kimura. She was invited by a certain Professor S. to move from a national university in the provinces to come and work at a university in Tokyo. Professor S. was very happy, and started taking Kimura out to bars, and inviting her to go and sing karaoke. After a while, though, he started saying things like "I love you," and "I'm going to divorce mywife." He started putting his hand on her knee, and Amari ni mo sekuhara ga hidoi no de (His pestering her got so bad that-) she told him, "Look, I'm your colleague, not your girlfriend or your mistress; and anyway, people like you make me sick, so Moo sekuhara wa yamete kudasai (Stop pestering me)."
Since then, Professor S. has been phoning her almost every night, and Sekuhara meita koto wo shaberi-tsuzukeru (Carries on saying offensive things to her). He is unkind to her in other ways too, by spreading rumors about her amongst the students, and hiding her mail, for example.
Omoikitte sekuhara de uttaetara doo desu ka (Why don't you just go ahead and sue him), I suggested, but she didn't want to because it would cause too much inconvenience for the university. The whole situation is really frustrating.
The status of women in Japan seems to have improved over recent years, but there still seems to be just as many perverts on the trains, and Shokuba de no sekuhara mo, ikko ni nakunarisoo ni nai (There's no sign of sexual harassment at work getting any better either).