Having grown up on an island off of Seattle, then moving to Japan to study, I have experienced major culture shock in my life. When thinking of Japan, you probably conjure up images based on its other-worldly and eccentric nature. My mom is Japanese, so from an early age, I had spent plenty of time in the country. It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with the food, the polite people, and their culture in general.
However, it wasn’t until I moved there that I uncovered some of the negatives of Japanese society.
While I still have a lot of fondness for Japan, some of the things I discovered are simply inexcusable and necessary to talk about. It was a slap in the face to realize that the country I had come to love was not as safe as I had once thought it was. The moment I realized this was when I was walking back home and in broad daylight, and was followed by a man who was masturbating. I was shocked, and left to process the whole encounter for hours and hours later.
One thought this encounter provoked in me was the need to discover the nuances and less spoken about realities of the Japanese sexual culture. When people talk about Japan, they always ask me if it’s true that there are love hotels. It’s true, they are scattered throughout. They are used solely for sex (referred to as “rest”). Customers pay by the hour, renting out a room for a few hours, or even the day. There are girl and boy bars — places that you can pay for drinks and the comfort of talking to a cute person of either sex and be made to feel important. Then there are Red Light Districts in Tokyo, where you can pay for oral sex (sometimes even penetrative sex), and oftentimes there are porn magazines in convenient stores. It is commonly said that whatever your sexual desire is, Japan can fulfill it.
The irony lies in the fact that, despite what many would consider an oversaturation of sex in Japan, the citizens are underexposed to the negative impacts of such an environment. The age of consent in Japan is 13, there are train carriages specifically designated for women, and the shutter sound on Japanese phone cameras cannot be muted — a governmental effort to deter perpetrators from taking creepy up-skirt photos. It is not uncommon for women to get groped on the train (hence the need for women-only carriages). My friends have experienced this firsthand and have even had indecent photos airdropped to them on trains.
In a country as overexposed to sex as Japan, one would hope that people would freely speak out about sexual harassment and assault, but unfortunately, the opposite is true. Japan is incredibly hush-hush about sex. In 2013, The Guardian reported that people under 40 have been losing interest in having relationships and sex in general. In 2017, the BBC found that 43% of the population aged 18-34 claims to be virgins. An aging society is growing in Japan, as birth rates are decreasing. Sexism in Japan — and how it culminates into sexual violence — plays a significant role in this decline.
Japanese laws on rape were not changed for 110 years until 2017. This led to rapists serving shorter prison sentences than those convicted of theft. Does Japanese society think of an object as having more importance than a woman’s body? During police investigations, police have been known to make victims reenact the incident with a sex doll. Imagine the trauma and re-traumatization that victims must endure throughout this process.
A brave woman, Shiori Ito, recently came out publicly after having been raped by renowned journalist Noriyuki Yamaguchi. She came forward in a society where topics such as rape are taboo to talk about. In the face of police reluctance to even take her case at all, Shiori showed the police footage of her unable to walk through a hotel, propped up by Yamaguchi who had drugged her just shortly before. He claims that she got too drunk. Finally, after officials started to take the case seriously and were close to making an arrest, the case was called off — theories include the involvement of the Prime Minister to aid the perpetrator. Shiori received wide scale backlash and threats, leaving her unable to go back to her house for three months.
Solely looking at the statistics, Japan seems to be a safe country. In 2017, The Japan Times reported that, “In fiscal 2015, 1,167 rapes and 6,755 cases of indecent assault were reported to the police across Japan.” The article goes on to take into account what police figures do not: widespread unreported rapes. Working with figures from the Japanese government, 95% of rapes go unreported. That is to say, “the real figure for rapes in the country could be more than 27,000.” In 2018, The Japan Times again reported on a similar issue, demonstrating that “1,750 cases of groping or molestation were reported in 2017, of which 30 percent occurred between 7 and 9 a.m.” Just as with rapes, a high percentage probably go unreported.
I share this knowledge to spread awareness of the current social climate in what seems to be a relatively safe place from the outside. It’s hard to live in a society that is so hush-hush and has such evident double standards regarding sex and its consenting participants and non-consenting victims. I did not discover what was occurring beneath the surface until I lived in Japan myself.
The #MeToo movement is not that big in Japan, but after Shiori Ito spoke out about her assault, some changes are starting to occur. Despite the oppressive taboos that still surround discussion of this dire issue, I hope that women can continue to find their voices. Stories of girls and women being groped on packed trains can no longer be a norm — and a norm that gets brushed aside, at that.
(To learn more about Japan’s cultural attitude towards sex, I’d recommend watching the BBC documentary, Japan’s Secret Shame.)
Photos (first two) by Jairo Granados, and third by Sofia Amburgey.Â