I've blogged before here about some of the cultural ephemera attendant to Japanese sexual life: their "Love Hotels;" and also the odious and pathetic train gropers of urban Japan, known as chikan, middle-aged businessmen with busy hands. Crammed cars allow sneaky liberites with women passengers - and they've turned it into an art, forming clubs to share techniques (I kid you not), and keeping score of their "conquests." Now there are even Internet "gropers guilds (see last link in this post) where chikan can learn the best train lines and times for groping. Their perverted persistence led to deployment of women-only subway cars on some lines last year.

Now, the Georgia Straits alternative weekly in Vancouver reports of a typically bleeding-edge play being staged locally about a young Japanese woman who is a powerless victim of chikan.

In the train incident, the young woman finds herself unable to protest due to gender roles. The script makes it clear that her acquiescence is expected. The recorded voice that says things such as “Please step away from the door” also intones, “Please be aware that this happens to 64 percent of Japanese women between the ages of 19 and 40” and “Please be aware that no one will ever admit to witnessing what just happened.”

But it turns out that this part of the current trendy play - titled "Sexual Practices Of The Japanese" - was already outdated last month, as I discovered the other day doing a Google News search for "chikan." The Times of London reports that just before Christmas, a young woman being groped by a chikan on an Osaka train caught and confronted him, and what ensued after that was quite remarkable.

A commuter who allegedly groped a college girl on a crowded train collapsed and died after being chased along a platform by fellow passengers. The 40-year-old office worker fled the train when it pulled into a station after the student screamed and accused him of groping her bottom and legs. Four male passengers, including two off-duty policemen, gave chase, bringing him to the ground as he tried to escape. He died later in hospital from a heart attack.

The incident took place on the morning rush-hour express on the Hanwa Line to central Osaka — a spectacularly crowded commuter route that has become one of the most notorious hunting grounds of Japan’s reviled chikan, or railway gropers. As the packed carriage pulled into Tennoji station, the student is said to have shrieked loudly, grabbed her alleged chikan by the shoulder and told fellow passengers what had happened. Instead of ignoring her plight, as Japanese commuters routinely do, fellow passengers decided to take the law into their own hands.

The incident has highlighted the widespread problem of groping on trains in Japan. But the ferocity of the other passengers’ reaction has also sounded alarm bells. Male Japanese commuters appear to have been stirred to a new mood of chivalry by a hugely popular TV drama, in which a woman falls in love with the man who rescued her from a drunken chikan. Until yesterday that mood had not translated into vigilante-style incidents.

Naturally, the artsy take on chikan in Vancouver emphasizes the helplessness of the victim. But it seems perhaps the paradigm is shifting. Of course, try that on an American commuter train or bus, and you'd get your nuts handed to you. Appropriately so, I'd add.

These chikan fellows are all probably hooked on Internet porn, as well. Sad. Many are doubtless in marriages of convenience that have fizzled out, and turn to such kinks thusly. The life of the "salaryman" is bleak in many respects. But his wife's is probably worse.

TECHNORATI TAGS: JAPAN, TRAIN GROPERS, CHIKAN, CAUGHT, OSAKA, VANCOUVER, VICTIMOLOGY

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at January 22, 2006 07:49 PM

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