For a long time, there was no specific law dealing with workplace bullying and harassment in Japan. However, on 29 May 2019, the archipelago adopted a text defining the concept of moral harassment at work known in Japan as “Power Harassment” (“pawa hara”). However, the legislative process leading to this result was complex. This study will show how a country such as Japan has gradually awakened to the idea of legislating on workplace bullying and harassment. This allows a comparison with the construction of the French legal regime in this area according to the recent developments such as the France Telecom case, but also in the light of ILO Convention No. 190 on harassment and violence at work. The need for a change in Japanese labour law was becoming pressing in view of the rise in indicators relating to work-related mental diseases including suicide. Before the law of 29 May 2019, there was no legal provision specific to Power Harassment, but Japanese law was not devoid of remedies to deal with this phenomenon. At the same time, successive working groups were set up in order to launch a debate aimed at better defining and regulating power harassment, while being accompanied by landmark decisions handed down by Japanese courts. This process resulted in a legal text enacted for the labour administration defining Power Harassment that incorporates a representation of the notion of “superiority” in labour relations. French law on bullying and harassment at work is, on the contrary, older, dating back to the law of 17 January 2002, and is the source of a very abundant jurisprudence on the subject. The latest advances to date are the consequences of the France Telecom ruling, handed down on 19 December 2019, which recognised the notion of “institutional psychological harassment” understood as a “general company policy destabilising and stressing a community.” The company's former managers were sentenced to prison. The “France Telecom” case shows that certain management methods, aimed in this particular case at reducing the workforce, give rise to acts of bullying and harassment leading the targeted persons to commit suicide. This case echoes certain management methods in Japanese companies and long working hours as shown, for example, by the jurisprudence related to the “Dentsu case(2000).” The aim of this proposal is to draw lessons from the comparison between France and Japan, in terms of bullying and harassment in the workplace, in the light of recent developments, but also by relating these developments to the entry into force of ILO Convention No. 190 on 19 June 2020.