About a year ago, we wrote about SwipeMart, the convenience store set up by dating app Tinder in Shibuya. We included a nice video by Asagi, a dating consultant who specializes in intercultural and interracial relationships.
Asagi is herself now married and has a young family with a non-Japanese partner, so you could say that she knows what she's talking about.
But she doesn't just give guys advice about how to date Japanese ladies. She also posts other kinds of content, such as this video about an issue that we have frequently covered here on Tokyo Kinky: chikan, or public groping.
Though ...
Gropers on trains in Japan are filming their activities and selling them on websites in China, according to an investigation by the BBC.
The recently published report claims that public molestation videos are a growing market, with content sourced from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China.
Known as chikan in Japan and most common on public transport like crowded trains, groping is a widespread social problem in East Asia. Public awareness of it is very high, with posters at train stations warning people to be vigilant, and even women-only carriages on rush-hour ...
In mid-January, Japan is gripped by a short, sharp season: it's the time of the college entrance exam.
Up and down the country, high school students sat down last weekend for the exam that will determine which university they will go to from the spring.
But there's another factor involved in the exam: chikan. This, as regular readers will know, is the Japanese word for groping or molesting, especially if done on public transport like trains.
What's the connection between the exam season and train groping? Apparently, in the darker corners of social media and the internet where chikan folk ...
While train groper (chikan) stories are two a penny, a somewhat more sensational one grabbed the headlines recently: someone accused of groping a passenger and caught at Shinjuku Station fled across the tracks, causing delays to four major JR lines for 50 minutes, including the Yamanote Line. Far from escaping, though, the man seriously injured himself and is currently hospitalized.
The incident took place on October 28 at around 11:15 p.m.
Well, it now turns out that the suspect was none other than a police officer!
It doesn't bode well for your police force, already under fire for how ...
Another week, another chikan story.
As regular readers to this blog will know, groping on public transport is a serious problem in Japan, so much so that it has its own name (chikan) and tactics to deal with it -- primarily women-only carriages.
This doesn't seem to stop the perpetrators, though, but we also seem to spot an increasingly number of reports now about them being caught or having to escape in outlandish ways.
On the morning of Wednesday, December 15, an alleged male groper tried to evade justice by jumping from the tracks at Minami-Senju Station on the Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line ...
The latest gimmick in the ongoing campaign against chikan, or groping, on trains involves a stamp.
The idea here is that the chikan stamp, made by a Nagoya-based stationery company known for personal seals and stamps, can be used by the victim to mark the perpetrator.
When and after they are groped, victims -- who are often young and vulnerable -- may feel too shocked or scared to speak out, or physically unable to hold onto the perpetrator to prevent him (or her) from getting away. This stamp is a solution, since it lets the victim "brand" the criminal easily and clandestinely.
Known ...
If you're a young woman in Japan, especially in a big city like Tokyo, and you ride the train regularly, the chances are you have encountered the problem of chikan, or groping. Schoolgirls are frequent targets, probably because of their obvious sexual appeal to certain men but also because their youth means they are more likely to be too scared to do anything when groped in public.
Train carriages carry plenty of warnings about chikan, usually in the form of stickers or posters, ostensibly aimed at the perpetrators and witnesses. But what about publicity for victims or potential victims?
It ...
Chikan is a chronic problem on public transport in Japan that doesn't seem to be getting better any time soon. Despite the introduction of women-only carriages during rush hour and the display of posters and "shame stickers" warning offenders that groping is a crime, the number of men who do it never seems to decrease. If #MeToo was just about chikan, the number of tweets would likely break Twitter's servers.
Kumi Sasaki says she was groped "nearly daily" on her commute to and from school in Japan. She was aged between 12 and 18.
Her first experience of chikan was on the crowded JR ...
Being of that kind of mind, the Japan Suspicious Person Information Centre (JASPIC) conducted a seven-month study on "perverts" based on reports from police and municipalities. The Japanese term here is fushinsha, a "suspicious person." This, though, does not refer to spies or would-be thieves, but voyeurs, flashers and chikan (gropers).
JASPIC reports that 11,607 incidents were officially recorded from March to October this year, and of these 4,487 -- around 40% -- were in the vicinity of train stations.
Naturally, there are a lot of stations in Japan and most of the 4,487 are spread ...
Back in May we reported on the incredible story -- actually one of the most intriguing things we have ever heard -- of a chikan incident on a Wakayama train in which a woman was groped by two men who believed that the woman had asked them to do it via an online forum.
In fact, she had done no such thing and they had been set up. Her protests were more realistic than the two men expected and one got off the train. When the other man also attempted to leave at the end of the line, he was grabbed by the victim and arrested.
The 26-year-old from Osaka protested his innocence and the police soon ...
