I wrote:

> > I've seen more pickpockets

Eric Takabayashi asked:

> What did you do?

There's not usually very much one *can* do. The first time I saw it in
Japan, for instance, all I saw was one man *giving* another man a wallet. If
I wasn't (don't sneer!) "street wise" I wouldn't have known what that was
about. I didn't at the time speak enough Japanese to be able to express
myself very clearly, and said something a bit garbled, like "Dorobou to
omouimasu!" but no one paid any attention for about ten minutes. Then
someone started going through his pockets and grumbling, but the perps had
got out long before.

The second time, I saw a woman relieved of her purse. I told her what I'd
seen and who did it, but also warned her that he'd have passed it along to
his friend by now, which was true enough; he emptied out his pockets with an
air of aggrieved innocence to show he was clean.

> I've never witnessed pickpockets or chikan.

Thank you, Eric. Precisely my point. I doubt whether Ernest Schaal has
either. So it's not just in my blinkered view of Japan that "the norm" for
people in trains is to be snoozing, reading newspapers, listening to
Walkmans, etc., and it is *not* the norm for them to be either the
perpetrators or victims of sexual groping? QED.

And before you fall back on your statistics, forget it. They just don't cut
it. Most people in the UK have had something stolen at least once in their
lives, but that doesn't make theft "the norm".

To say that chikan is the norm for Japanese men is distorted and prejudiced.
I really cannot imagine any of my male colleagues, my male students or my
male neighbours engaging in such behaviour. OK, I can't vouch for what
someone might do if very drunk on the last train home, but to suggest that
such perversion is mainstream is, frankly, pernicious.

I'm not trying to say that sexual harassment isn't a problem here in Japan,
and I am not condoning it in any way. On the contrary, I'd give very short
shrift to any offender that ever crossed my path. But that's a long way from
saying that it is "the norm" for Japanese men to behave like that.

> if your eyes and ears were open like you said, you might notice that
> the real Japan is not your own life.

Eric, you just said it yourself; *you have never seen chikan behaviour*. How
much more wide-open do you want my eyes to be here?

> Why the clumsy attempt at deflection again? Yes, sexual harassment and
> continuing inequality, among many other things, are problems in the US.
[snip]
> But we were talking about Japan, Japanese politicians, and Japanese
> people and their problems, not America.

How can I convey the point that *every* country has these problems, and that
sexual harassment is no more "the norm" in Japan than anywhere else without
making comparisons with other countries?

We have someone saying that sexual groping is the norm in Japan. That
someone is rude and racist and I'll bet there's a better than 50% chance
he's kinpatsu, so he's very likely American (as you point out in another
thread, these are apparently characteristics of the culture ;-)), so
comparisons with America are surely germane to the discussion. And if anyone
wants to start throwing mud at the Brits, or other nationalities, that's
fine too. As I said before, no country comes out of this rosy.

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com