Sexual Harassment in Japan and How One Guy Handled It
According to a survey, between 2013 and 2022, recorded rapes in Japan were 1.66 per thousand, while the number of reported "forcible indecencies" were 4.7 per thousand.
Those stats need more context, so here's the story.
While both of those stats are increases, they are significantly lower than many countries, such as the US and others in Europe which are at least 30x higher. However, Japan's history of sexual violence against women is common to the point where it's embedded in the culture. We're talking about sexual harassment, domestic violence, molestation...the list goes on.
But you wouldn't know it, especially since their justice system boasts a more than 90% conviction rate.
The truth is, acts of sexual violence have a level of impunity in the society. As a result, too many cases go unreported.
This plays into the misleading narrative of Japan being a country that is effectively handling its sex violence crimes.
This devastates victims and the byproduct is a higher rate of mental health issues, such as suicidal ideation, depression, PTSD, you name it.
There's also a "blame the victim" mentality that straddles victims of sexual violence, along with Japan's patriarchal culture. It's alreaydy hard for any rape victim to get justice. In Japan, these victims become invisible and are papered over like unwanted wallpaper.
Japan's Penal Code prohibits rape, but the legal definiteion of rape has always been the problem.
In 2017, changes to the Code specified that men could be victims of sexual violence and sexual acts with children under 18 were now prohibited.
But it wasn't enough.
The Flower Demo in 2019 brought the inadequacy of these laws into the mainstream. The led to the law being expanded to include voyeuristic photography and the idea of consent, especially between spouses.
The Flower Demo is Japan's MeToo, and it's credited with making major changes, but there's still so much further to go.
For many of us, the idea of dishing Karma to rapists and harassers is tempting. If we could make them pay, we would. There's a story I found about how an American student studying in Japan handled a case of sexual harassment of a friend in Japan.
The question is did he go too far?
You be the judge.
This whole episode went down about a year ago.
This post was around 2018/19. which means the incident happened around 2017/18. So it was around the time that things were coming to a boil as far as the laws on sexual violence.
Basically, I was doing an exchange program at a college in Japan. The classes were all co educational with Japanese and foreign students. My program only had about 35 or so people, so almost everyone was on a first name basis with each other and we were a fairly tight knit group.
Because of this, we often had class parties where everyone hung out and talked/drank/etc...
At one of these parties, I noticed that one of my female Japanese friends was being cornered and forced to talk with another American exchange student, and was looking a little bit uncomfortable. I went over and asked her if she could go help me get more drinks from the supermarket, and she used the excuse to hurry out of there.
Kudos to OP for being aware enough of the situation and helping his friend get out.
From now on, I'm going to call this dickhead "D"
I was hoping this would be a one and done thing, but in the following days I noticed that my friend seemed a little on edge around D. One day, I pretty much layed it out and asked her if the incident at the party was bothering her and if there was anything I could do about it. She confided in me that D had also been begging her to date him, sending her explicit messages about what he would "do to her", and messaging her dick pics even after she asked him to stop. Apparently that party wasn't the first time he'd cornered her either, and he had a pretty significant size advantage on her too, so It was easy to see why she was so intimidated.
After she told me all that, I gotta admit, I was pretty furious. I urged her to report that kind of thing to the dean, or the police, but she told that she did not want to tell the adminstrators or authorities about it. While I'm no expert on Japanese culture or criminal procedure, but she made it sound like there was a significant chance she might get brushed off or not believed if she escalated it. Plus once word got back to D, she might have a pissed off white guy on her ass with 50 pounds and a foot on her.
The OP stated in a separate comment that he had been to sexual assault seminars and he understood that he needed to respect his friend's wishes and not speak to the authorities. He knew that D would probably find out, putting his friend in danger.
Normally I'm a goody two shoes, but at that point I was willing to do anything short of an ass beating (had to think of my Visa) to get back at this asshole. My chance came a few weeks later, when I got invited to a gaming discord group with some of the other guys from my program, including D.
I was reading back in old chats, because I was still trying to read up on this guy. Concincidentally, I happened upon an exchange where him and the other guys were joking around by messaging each other weird porn in the chat. It was mostly pretty ridiculous stuff, like that spider porn video and shit like that, until I spotted it: in the chat D had posted a picture of "lolicon" hentai (drawn child porn for those who don't know). I screenshotted it fast and saved it on my computer.
Hentai is overtly sexualized Japanese manga, what we call comics. I am not familiar with 'lolicon,' but the minute I saw the word, I thought of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, which is about a professor that becomes obsessed with his preteen stepdaughter.
I debated back and forth for a while, but eventually I did it. I cropped the screenshot I had taken of D's "lolicon" message and uploaded it on social media. When I posted it, I cut off the joking context, and essentially painted D as a bona fide pedophile and myself as a "whistleblower" so to speak. I thought that everyone would look at him weird and whisper behind his back, and that it would humilate him but eventually blow over. I was dead wrong on that.
Revenge is a funny thing. You think it will go one way but it goes another way, if not much worse.
My post "blew up" about as much as it could have in a social media group with less than 100 people. I had a reputation as being good student and pretty serious guy, so a lot of people took my post at face value. Apparently, I also wasn't the only one with a bone to pick with D, and soon a bunch of people had come forwards with accounts of him being creepy or harrassing them. All his friends cut him off to avoid being associated with the drama, and eventually someone forwarded the school staff the pictures/reports about D. I don't know what happened to him, but he didn't come back at the start of the next semester.
From what I've seen of his social media, he hasn't really recovered yet. I saw him posting on some depression support type groups, which is actually what prompted me to make this post. While I know he probably deserved to be called out, I dont want him to kill himself or anything. I can't help but feel like a real dick, both for betraying my own morals and for letting it get so out of hand. I don't know if I should apologize to him, or just let sleeping dogs lie.
This is an interesting dilemma within a dilemma. He called the harasser out in an even more serious way, it turned into a devastating backlash, and now he thinks he should confess/apologize.
Reddit commentors were divided on this one. Here are some responses:
There are many more, so the question is: What do you think?
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