Pro Commerce

Military outlook

San Francisco
Now that I'm back my friends are asking me about Japan.  The social milieu is the same as the U.S today and in the 1950s... macaroni and cheese. Nesting with comfort food with a home media center. (Aerial photo of S.F. Bay)

The military story is quite different. Thanks to an aggressive China and her puppet state (N. Korea) Japan is on a straight-line path to becoming a modern military power. Japan and Taiwan are already allies. They will become mighty military allies in less than a decade.

Flight back to San Francisco

San Francisco
I write that byline because I lost about half of my weekly readers with the Tokyo byline.  I was regularly getting more than 20,000 hits a week before going to Tokyo.  It dropped to half of that with the Tokyo byline.  Maybe I should have emphasized that I am not a conventional tourist.  I have been going to Japan for 30 years and Tokyo for 25.  I have had many clients and been a partner in a Tokyo social think tank.

The trip back began with political venom.  I found I couldn't cut a juicy fresh apple with the plastic knives available on airplanes.  I asked myself whether the loss of silverware on airplanes, the long lines for screening and the total cost of airline security and customer delays justified: the possible hours of lost sleep of inmate jihadists and Islamophobic lipstick on the panties of interrogators at Guantanamo. My answer is “yes.”

Eminent domain

There was a big and justifiable bruhaha about the recent Supreme Court holding that the City of New London, Connecticut was legally able to condemn and buy the homes of Susette Kelo and her neighbors for the purpose of creating a new shopping development.

The new shopping development would ostensibly create additional jobs and additional tax revenue for New London. The Court found 5 to 4 that the “taking” was legal because it meets the Constitutional requirement of public use.  More jobs and more taxes are sufficient to justify eminent domain.   

No radiation problem

Tokyo
This is my final radiation reading.  I return to San Francisco Tuesday. The reading was the normal level of 11 clicks in 60 seconds.  The same as when I arrived and the same every Sunday since then.

New Criterion/Kolakowski

I subscribed to the New Republic, a few years ago, because of its excellent book reviews edited by Leon Weiseltier.  I need to know what good books are on the market. Books shape the world of the future.

The rest of the New Republic magazine is an intellectual cross between Moveon.org and Michael Moore. These days, Weiseltier has been hanging out too much on the upper East side of Manhattan and with his compatriots at the New Republic .... with the consequent declining moral effect on his mind.

When I read Roger Kimball's review (in New Criterion) of Leszek Kolakowski's recent books, I immediately subscribed to New Criterion and ordered several of Kolakowski's books.  I have always loved Kimball's work and have read articles by Kolakowski, but none of his books.

Hello New Criterion, goodbye New Republic.

Google and the French problems

The French problem with Google paying to digitize millions of books in English libraries, is not the obvious problem of leaving the French out. They can always digitize their own libraries.

The problem is that the overwhelming amount of global writing about France and the French, including translations, is by non-French and will present a non-French position.

Havana

In talking to strangers, I have occasionally mentioned that I have been to Cuba. There is a common response that includes two parts: isn't it hard for Americans to go Cuba? And isn't the embargo terrible?

The question from an hypothetical world of decent intelligent people would be: isn't it terrible that Cubans are held prisoner under the dictatorship of a communist tyrant? 

The Left has created a  large number of indecent heartless people and a nation of suffering slaves in the Carribean.  Based on the following three irrefutable facts:

North Korea

Tokyo
If you are certain you have a clear picture of North Korea, you will be challenged by the photos on this page.  I took two photos of a North Korean school (K-12) here in Tokyo.  Did you know that such a place existed?

There are roughly 15,000 North Koreans and their children living here. The school has images of Kim Jong-Il in a sacred place at the front of every classroom, patriotic songs are sung in class every day and history is taught from the same texts that are used in North Korea.

The economy

Tokyo
The American press is heavily covering the story about diverging incomes in the U.S.. Some of my friends are talking about the same thing here.

So I'll explain.  The U.S. is in the longest strongest sustained period of economic growth in its history. Longest, strongest ever. All incomes are going up, on net, some faster than others.

Every eighteen months Americans (and illegal aliens) are adding more total wealth to their pockets than the total wealth all the Chinese in China earn in a year.  We add an amount equal to their total income.

So where does that gigantic increase in national wealth go? 

First it becomes income for individuals and corporations, then it goes into investments.  For the past four years it has not gone into the U.S. stock market.  Most of the individual income has gone into housing ... trillions of dollars including home improvement.  Most of corporate wealth is converging in bigger U.S. companies and  investments overseas.  America is a golden goose laying eggs faster than we can pick them up.

Income distribution is changing slightly, more of the new wealth is going to the top of the income stream.  Let me state a fact: neither you, I, nor any economist or scholar has any viable idea on how new national income gets distributed. Nobody really knows how or why. Incomes diverge in periods of rapid national growth and converge during static periods. Nobody has an even modest explanation, much less an explanation based on data.  Income distribution is measured by the Gini index.

I wrote a blog last year and mentioned the Gini index. Gini is a measurement of income distribution; nearly equal distribution is a low number, highly unequal distribution is a high number.

On a global chart of Gini indexes: “the top of the chart would have Japan and the industrial nations, with the U.S. at the bottom of the major industrial nations and the list would continue on down with the former communist nations all the way at the bottom joined with Latin American countries, the third world and at the very bottom, the underdeveloped nations. Income inequality is worse as economic development lags.”

Japan, with the most even distribution of income on the planet, is experiencing the same Gini changes that we in the U.S. are experiencing. 

The U.S. has the lowest Gini of a major industrial nation but is the driving economic force on the planet.  Those are facts. All else is speculation and moralizing.

Bile and dirty underwear

I assume that most of my readers have little interest in comments on this blog that attack me personally. I don't object to ad hominem arguments, abstractly, when all other forms of argument have failed; but I do object when no effort has been made to analyze, rebut or enter meaningful dialog.  Therefore I am eliminating comments that are ad hominem when they arrive.  Ad hominem arguments are the bile I'm referring to in the title.  People who make them before they enter the discussion are angry at the world.  The bile belongs in their stomach not on my blog.

I am further eliminating arguments based on Karl Marx and his class warfare thesis.  About one quarter of Americans and 65.3% of university professors use this analytic tool. The problems are that it is irrelevant 99.8% of the time, it is the most repeated mantra in English and the human models derived from this analysis have led to Stalin, Castro, Mao and several other nightmares.  We don't need this dirty underwear on this blog.

Takekawa method

Tokyo
I joined a business (partnership) in Tokyo in the early 1980s, founded by Seiji Takekawa, called Dynax.  Dynax was the first social think tank to my knowledge. 

Dynax's most brilliant job for a client was to learn the tastes of young Japanese women aged 12 to 16 for a giant department store chain.  The solution was to hand out fliers to all the girls in the local middle-schools. The flier offered the young woman a chance to phone a number and ask questions of an anonymous older girl on Mondays and Wednesdays and phone the same number on Tuesdays and Thursdays to hear a short tape of the questions and answers. Ingenious, and it worked perfectly as a marketing research tool.

The Takekawa Method was even more brilliant but there were many different kinds of clients.  The method was aimed at understanding complex business and social ideas. The method involves using a group of intelligent people, say a dozen. The group listens to a speaker on a relevant subject of interest, all the while filling out 3x5 cards with the main ideas of the speaker.  After the speaker is done, the group puts up all their note cards up on a board, under the direction of a facilitator.  The notes, with discussion among the group, are put into categories of major ideas. The consequence is that the final result shows the underlying structure of the speaker's subject. This is an effective way of examining unspoken assumptions and underlying concepts for any important subject.

I visited my partner, Takekawa, who is dying of interstitial lung growth.  I don't expect to see my beloved partner again next year. The world has lost a brilliant businessman and great social thinker.

Mother eating business

Tokyo
I visited Akihabara today.  The relationship of my visit and the title of this blog will be explained.

Akihabara is the world famous electronics area that has always been filled with tiny shops that sell electronic parts: resistors, chips, amps and micro-disks. Every geek knows about Akihabara, even if they have never visited Japan and never heard of Kyoto.

Today, I saw the end of Akihabara on its way.  Much of the area of tiny shops has been leveled to the ground and the rest is surrounded by high rises including offices, restaurants, and electric appliance mega stores.  With the attendant rise in land prices the tiny geek shops will not survive.

I love commerce.  Unlike people who don't love commerce I can see the genuine problems of commerce.  Such as promoting old timers and loyalists to the tops of corporations (informal nepotism) and old line stores fighting against new upstarts and chains maliciously.

The other problem  that I have seen for decades needs a name.  It is what is going on in Akihabara.  The small irregular business that brought the foot traffic in the first place is being crowded out by businesses that never knew and still can't see what brings customers to the area.  The vitality will be gone in roughly a decade.

I saw this happen on the dull boring intersection of Sacramento and Presidio in San Francisco. In the late 1970's a brilliant women's handmade clothing store opened: Obiko. The foot traffic was so great that dozens of businesses were drawn to the area by the “Site Location” experts who just look at the pedestrian traffic numbers. After less than ten years Obiko was forced out when a Savings & Loan took the space next door and wanted to expand.  The area has slowly died every year since then.

Hence my title: Mother eating business. That is when new business drives out the original business that created the thriving business neighborhood in the first place.

Radiation update

Tokyo
Radiation is unchanged.  Since the bursts of measured radiation are irregular I had to measure for 120 seconds to get the same average as in the past: 11 per minute.

Class A war criminals

Tokyo
The current brouhaha between China and Japan is about the PM's annual visit to Yasukuni Shrine where Class A war criminals are buried along with others who died fighting for Japan.

China claims that Japan signed a secret agreement in 1986 to move the Class A war criminals to another burial ground.  Japan (and my knowledgeable friends) claim that no such agreement ever existed.

The Japanese “official” explanation (every Japanese says it) for the current incendiary climate is the weakness of the Chinese Communist party and the need to create external enemies (including Taiwan.)

The photo on the left is a group of young Japanese practicing their singing in a park with a memorial stone behind them. The stone commemorates Sugamo prison, on the same site, where war criminals were hanged.

Unions are vestigial

Tokyo
Yesterday I went looking for the retail store that sells products made in Fuchu prison*. I had visited the retail store about 15 years ago.  The retail store that was inside Tokyo is closed and is now outside the front of the prison, in the suburbs of Tokyo. (Photo of Fuchu prison front gate.)

Which reminds me that we don't have prisoners doing work for the marketplace in the U.S. because of unions. (Prisoners do work on products for use by the States and do maintenance and cooking for the prisons.)

Unions are the main opponents of free trade agreements, more relaxed immigration laws. Unions kept blacks out of the labor market longer than any other institution and they vigorously fight meritocracy in the workplace. Unions are the main vestigial remnant of feudalism in modern society, since we have eliminated “fair” pricing, bans on banking, inherited social classes, peasants bound to the land, debtors prison and indentured labor.

* See Annette S. Leung's blog on her visit to Fuchu prison (photo by Annette.)

Alexander Hamilton Biography

The issue is not whether my blog readers would want to read Ron Chernow's book, the issue is whether the reader should be forewarned about the immensely disturbing power of the book.  Many readers may prefer a peaceful, solace-ridden tome to relax with.  This book makes the reader furious at the calumny of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, but most of all Thomas Jefferson. 

The reader of Chernow's book is burdened, on every page, by the realization that the greatest mind and most potent force in the creation of the United States has had his contribution to our modern world stolen from us.  I know our early history, as conventionally taught, and this book was like a blinding laser light in a heavy-drape darkened room.

A reader is also faced with a recognition of one's own mortality and the power of a great biographer, such as Ron Chernow, to give our most important labors and contributions a meaningful context in the history of our time. Chernow knows history, he understands management and administration as almost no other historians ever have, and he could be considered the first policy wonk of early America. 

What Chernow misses, as a person, is a complex sex life.  Consequently, Chernow is unable to understand and convey the power of Hamilton's one incredible and deeply destructive passion for Maria Reynolds.  This kind of passion is so powerful and so unexpected when it happens that few men who have experienced it can doubt its power to generate male pattern blindness.

This is one of a few dozen books that go on the main shelf of my library.

Unnecessary kindness

Tokyo
“Unnecessary kindness” is a literal translation of a Japanese phrase. I think it has broad implications and makes good sense in English.

One of the hardest lessons in my life, not taught by any group I know of, is that kindness should not be offered unless the recipient clearly welcomes it, otherwise it can create antagonism.

The issue comes up in an email I received from an important person in West African development, currently in the fourth year of living in West Africa.  She is normally anti-Bush but she totally supports Bush in his unwillingness to throw more money at Africans.

Bush has learned, as have other Americans who are alert to reality, that the 1996 welfare reform, that requires welfare recipients to get jobs, has worked  well. My friend makes it clear that throwing money at Africa has generated foreign aid dependency, corruption, individual irresponsibly on a broad scale and specifically has made Africans unwilling to invest their own money in their local village projects.  The attitude is now “wait until foreigners give us the money.”

Unfortunately Bush has to give a sop to PM Blair.  The African aid, properly classified adds a trivial half-a-percent to the cost of the war in Iraq.

Only in retailing here

Tokyo
I don't expect to see stores like this in the U.S.  The chain is just starting, located at very high pedestrian traffic points (train stations.)  The stores are called RanKing and RanQueen.  The stores carry the top five selling items (showing the ranking on the displays) in a wide range of goods from snacks to tooth grooming to hair grooming, to booze and soft drinks.

This is only possible in Japan because the ranking data comes from another chain, Tokyu Hands. Most stores in America and the rest of the world only carry the top three or four selling items per category. Tokyu Hands has roughly five times the number of items that would be found in an American store.  I counted five times as many forms of tape at Tokyu Hands as I would find in the biggest San Francisco art store or hardware superstore. 

With Tokyu Hands carrying so many different items of one kind, ranking the first five makes sense and works.  The rankings are updated weekly. (There was an article on this by Alice DuBois in the 4/24 NYTimes)

Safety and metaphor

Tokyo
Architects here use two distinct elements.  One on the right is the outside stairwell that would be a fire escape anywhere else, but is always integral to the design here. Very common if not universal.

The image on the left is a building with stainless steel chains hanging from the roof and creating the front facade.  The building in chains is a metaphor.  Maybe not PC in America.  This building is a library for the blind.

Swimming around the world

Tokyo
I swim wherever I go in the world. Most of the time I am indoors and look at the ceiling of the pool area when I do the backstroke. (My local pool ceiling on the right)

When I am outside, I get to see the sky and the clouds, the hotel and the buildings next to the pool and often the city skyline.  In Tokyo I have swum in one pool that was about 300 feet in the air, on the top floor of a building with a view of half of the City.

New art for America

Tokyo
I saw some transformative art a few days ago. I saw 200 flower arrangements done by the best living students of the Sogetsu School of ikebana.   In my opinion, more than 110 of the artists represented are better than the top dozen artists in the U.S. today, including Koons, Rauschenberg and Frank Gehry.

Is America ready for ikebana? The art world has accommodated found art for most of the last century, conceptual art and performance art.  Ikebana only lasts a few days, includes many found pieces, is influenced by the water container that holds it and is strongly influence by the context.  Americans still go to see improv theater, live music and dance. We know art can be transient.

I think America is ready for new great art.

I have been to ikebana exhibits in San Francisco put on by the S.F. chapter of the International Ikebana Society.  Not more than two artists from those exhibits would even qualify for the exhibit I saw here.

I believe we are ready for great ikebana.  I plan to start working on the goal of a first rate, world class exhibition when I get back to San Francisco. 

Voir dire

I suggest you read the U.S. Supreme Court decision on jury selection and bias against blacks.  I am sure my intelligent readers will conclude that the majority argument is wildly overstepping its bounds with serious overreach. The three conservative justices offer reasoned and convincing arguments about the law.

The court wastes its time arguing about the kind of evidence needed to prove anti-black prejudice in jury selection. 

I disagree strongly with the logic of the majority decision, but favor radical change in voir dire (jury selction) ... regardless.  The majority seems to think that prejudice about skin color is the paramount issue (there was one black male on the jury and one latino).   Limiting concern about prejudice to skin color alone is nonsense. 

Why is prejudice for, by or about blacks significantly different in jury deliberation from any other prejudice -- for or against women, old people, men, tatoos, rich people, poor people or small green eyes?   

The only proper jury is one that represents a wide variety of prejudices ... ordinary humans, in other words. To get such a real jury we need to make many changes: to pay the prevailing wage for jury duty, have child care in the court house, hold court hours so they allow real people to get work done (7 am to 1 pm), have very few reasons for getting off a jury and make everyone chosen serve with no pre-emptory challenges. 

How long do we wait until reason and intelligence prevail in the court room?

Another good laugh

These days I don't get much pleasure laughing at Lefty Fundamentalists. Their sorry world view of apocalypse and their soulful view of global misery evokes sympathy in me.

The poor creatures,  Lefty Fundamentalists suffer in their own self created world.

But I can't let my readers miss another good blast at the Lefty-self-inflicted-misery by Michael Wolff in Vanity Fair. 

Sony Librie

The Sony Librie came out last year.  It is a 6 oz. paperback book in computer form. The screen is very easily read, even in daylight, and it runs all day on a few AAA batteries.

What's wrong with Librie and why is it only sold in Japan? First, the price at $550 is much too high. The successful price point would be $200.  Second, Sony has the nonsensical view that people will buy proprietary books to use on the Librie. RCA is long out of business with a marketing plan based on this same absurd idea.

Fortunately, Sony has a new CEO brought in from the outside. That is almost a requirement for fixing a corporation.  The only thing worse in business and the only thing that is more absurd than nepotism is promoting someone to CEO based on seniority.  Five years with a company is enough to know it perfectly; more than five years is a sign of insider-itis.

All of this led me to examine the books that are already on the Internet. Most are HTML and a large number are PDF.  Those are the correct formats for an intelligent manufacturer of ebook-readers to use.

Most people think the book publishing business is doomed.  They may be right, but book reading is another thing.  Most readers are over 55 years old and no books they want to read are in large format.  Ebook-readers solve that problem automatically. The ebook can enlarge the print to any size.

Most importantly, there is a new generation of readers on the way: the millions of kids who read the 600-page Harry Potter books.

I can't imagine people paying more than a dollar or two for an online book, unless they work for a corporation and have to.  Libraries are already the market for special market segmented books in hardcover. What I foresee is the Internet equivalent of hardcover: Internet-based libraries that buy one expensive book for circulation to its membership. Members will download ebooks from their library. I already belong to a membership library for physical books.  Publishers will make less money, but university presses already know how to live solely on library sales.

In harms way

Tokyo
I always go for primary source data.

A discussion emerged in earlier blogs about the reason that Japanese commute trains now have a women-only car; it is the last car, with a pink sign for women commute riders only between 7:26 and 9:24 am.

To count 33 trains with roughly 36,000 passengers (19 cars were women-only with over 2,500 women riders), I stood on the platform at Yoyogi-Uehara station between the Okakyu line (that had the pink cars) and the Chiyoda subway line.

I was in harms way five times, when the women-only car arrived with passengers transferring across the platform to the subway.  Everyone runs, even in high heels. Being in the middle of this rush was like standing in the middle of a womens' roller derby track. An adrenalin high.

The data will not readily support anyone's theory about pink cars. The pink car is the 10^th car on the train. The composition of the other nine cars grew, in a straight line, from 5% women at 7:38 to 45% at 8:58.  The train cars were always full.  A train car holds 60 people seated, 120 people crowded and 140 people when railway personnel are available to push people on.  Only one train had 140 people per car, only two pink cars had 140 women.  On the whole, the pink cars have 10% fewer riders than the remaining 9 cars.

I got to observe an interesting but not defining experiment.  In five cases the train with the pink car waited for the subway (plenty of space in each car by then) and I counted the women going from the subway cars 8 and 9  to the waiting car 10, the pink car, on the other track. Roughly 500 women made this transition. Of these, 200 went from car 10 on the subway straight to car 10, women-only on the commute-line. Of the remainder, 100 went from subway cars 8 and 9 to the women-only car and the remaining 200 went to other cars.  This is not a defining experiment. The remaining ride on the pink car is less than 10 minutes and most Japanese seek the train car closest to their final exit.

Misc: One out of three women were wearing skirts, local trains had more than 50% women (maybe they live closer to their jobs) and one out of twenty women were wearing designer dresses.

I sacrificed for my readers.  What do you make of the data?

Radiation measurement

Tokyo
Its Sunday again and again I'm getting 11 comforting clicks per minute on my radiation meter. 

Several Japanese insiders have told me that the Japanese public has close to a majority supporting an end to Article 9 of the Constitution banning any form of military. In 1992, only 10% supported ending Article 9. If the North Koreans test a nuclear weapon, the Japanese public would go overwhelmingly in support of an aggressive missile defense system (quite feasible here since 90% of the population lives in four geographically dense locations), to be followed by Japan building its own  nuclear delivery system.

 

Images

                Tokyo
On the left is one of the funniest cartoons I recall seeing in a long time. (Click on the image to enlarge.) There is something powerful about a supposed insight that really isn't.

On the right is a wonderful piece of conceptual art on the street in my neighborhood. This is an old model cigarette machine.  Look inside the display. Hanging over each cigarette package on display is a tiny traditional symbol that is used in Japanese funerals. 

The image on the right below shows the cigarette machine as it stands outside the back of the restaurant. The sign is for the restaurant named Life. The sign supports "your life, slow life, good life."

My only comment, as a person who likes nicotine, is that this is good art and uses a popular conception about smoking to communicate its message. (Correlations of smoking and bad health have not been found in the Japanese population.)

Amnesty hasn't changed

I see writers and commentators bemoaning the change of Amnesty International from a good organization to a bad one. Wrong.

I wrote an article in opposition to Amnesty International in 1976.  I would change some of the material and up-date it on Amnesty practices, but most of it is still right on.

Am-nasty has not changed.  It is still elite English-speaking lefties arrogantly interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.  The problem with Amnesty International might be more obvious now if a terrorist nuclear power (not some little country that depends on American trade) demanded that America follow Sharia, let all Muslim prisoners go free and put all gays, usurers and women in bikinis into prison.

Today there are Islamicists who want to enforce their ideas on us.  The Islamicist version of Amnesty. Just as arrogant and just as certain they are right.

Over a year ago, Amnesty did a report on California prisons.  They talked to the leading prison reform organizer and founder of the main prison reform organizations (a close friend of mine). They didn't listen to a word she said. Instead the report was based entirely on the unsubstantiated rantings of ill-informed Lefty Fundamentalists.

Dean's statements

A friend sent me the following email.  I agree with it.

"What's most interesting about Howard Dean's recent flurry of ugly stereotypes about Republicans is that they are completely staged. The media, Republicans, and even fellow elected Democrats are all huffing and puffing about Howard Dean and his uncontrollable mouth.

"Dean and many elected Democrats (not just back room handlers) have been hosting soirees and workshops led by George Lakoff, and his new book about metaphor tactics in national politics is required reading for Democrat leaders.

 

"Lakoff's analysis is that Republicans win because they have a unified black and white story with simple metaphors that they use to put down Democrats (via the White House administration, the senate, fox news, talk radio, etc). Howard Dean's job is to lead the charge to create a competing black and white story -- complete with villians and bile -- to put down Republicans. Because he's not an elected official, he can do this without accountability to a base. It's interesting -- when I listen to Democratic members of the House or Senate distance themselves from Dean's comments, I'm not convinced. The whole thing just seems too staged. Even more interesting is that the media naively plays the story as though Dean just has a mouth problem. He's the chairman of the party. He DOES NOT have the freedom to privately script speeches for himself.

 

"Why is it that Democrats are so obsessed with failed linguistics professors (Chomsky & Lakoff)."

Language arbitrage

Tokyo
Lee goes to a coffee shop I like.  He makes his living with language arbitrage.  A good enough living to take three-month vacations.

Lee reads Japanese and buys and sells stamps on the Japanese Yahoo auction site.  He does arbitrage between Yahoo Japan and eBay US.  He knows the stamp market well.  When the price differential is great enough between the Japanese language and the English language markets, he buys and sells.  Stamps are low cost to ship, which is helpful; the Yen fluctuates relative to the dollar and right now Lee almost has the arbitrage market to himself.

If you know two languages well and you are an expert in some collectors' field, shouldn't you be doing language arbitrage?

More on pink cars

Tokyo
Several of my readers have shown interest in the subject of women-only cars on commute trains in Tokyo.

Last night, my partner and I had dinner with two experts on the general subject of gender in Japan. Okada, Yasuko and her close friend Reiko (the photo has Reiko on the left). Okada san runs a successful consulting firm on gender and power harassment (she coined the term power harassment), has most top Japanese corporations as her clients and runs an 800 number phone service for reports of sexual harassment.  She also deals with workplace alcoholism.  Reiko is a therapist and works with Yasuko.

On the subject of the women-only cars on commute trains they both agreed that the reason the women-only cars were created was because women don't like the general treatment they get from men.  Nothing specific about groping.  (When I helped them both put on their shoes when we left the elegant traditional style restaurant, they commented that no Japanese man would do that.)

Neither Yasuko nor Reiko ride commute trains (Yasuko walks to work and Reiko starts work after commute hours), but they said their female employees did occasionally ride in the women-only cars mainly because they are less crowded.

On Monday morning, I will go directly observe the roughly twenty trains on the Odakyu line that have women-only cars during commute hours.  I'll report back.