痴漢

A few days ago, the Center for International Education at Kansai Gaidai sent out an e-mail advising students to be careful around town, as lately there had been a couple of reported incidents of girls being groped around the area. Today while I was walking home around 6:30 PM, on a street almost directly in front of my host family’s house, some young guy rode by on his bike, grabbed my ass, and rode away. Flustered, I yelled at him, though couldn’t do anything else because he was faster than me, and the only other person on the street was a middle-aged woman at the opposite end. I wished I knew how to say what I really wanted to tell him in Japanese, but I was glad I did anything at all instead of remaining silent, like so many Japanese women do. When I got home, I told my host father, who was extremely sympathetic, and was glad that I wasn’t hurt or robbed, and told me to forget about it. And sure, I’m glad I wasn’t hurt or robbed either, but the incidence rate of this kind of sexual harassment is so high in Japan, and women are told to just forget about it because there’s nothing you can do. So much of it goes unreported, because women don’t think there’s anything the police can do for them, and they’re pretty much right. So for exactly that reason, I told my host family, and I e-mailed Kansai Gaidai about it, because at least it’s being reported somewhere, and I am not silenced. (To Kansai Gaidai’s credit, as I was writing this they e-mailed me and asked me to come in and provide more details so that they could report it to the police by my host family’s house.)

I am the most frustrated and angry because I already feel like as a woman and a foreigner, I can never be an integrated member of Japanese society. It’s hard for me to articulate how I feel oppressed as a woman here, but I definitely do. And it’s clear to me, and my host family, and Kansai Gaidai, that foreign women are a particular kind of easy target for chikan (perverts), probably not only because we’re exotic but because we have less agency. I understand that this kind of thing happens everywhere, and of course it happens in the United States, but because this kind of sexual harassment is so common in Japan, and because Japan is otherwise absurdly safe, and because women have significantly less agency here, etc., I am outraged.