Tokyo
In an earlier blog comment entry an article on
the pink cars on intercity private rail lines is mentioned; these cars are for women-only during morning commute hours. The question has come up whether the demand for these pink rail cars is
driven by a groping problem.
First, one needs to think about being groped, since it doesn't happen on a crowded Bart train after a baseball game. Reason: an American woman would make a ruckus and the groper might not survive.
Second, think about travelers. Women travelers complain bitterly about being groped in Italy, Turkey and Spain. Local women don't complain. It appears local women know how to handle the issue and foreigners are targets because they don't and because locals don't protect travelers.
Third, I have traveled in Japan for 33 years with dozens of women (Japanese and Korean included) gone tens of thousands of miles in crowded trains and no one has ever been groped. My partner tells me that her Japanese women friends have never mentioned the problem, and the Japanese women I know either dismiss groping as not a problem or one too trivial to talk about. So why the pink commute train cars?
The answer would require a new sociological instrument called the Gender-Cluster Index. Level 1 would be a society where men and women appear in mixed clusters publicly, most of the time. Level 5 would be a society where men and women almost never appear in mixed clusters together in public.
Level 1 would be (for most age groups) Americans and Dutch. Level 5 would be most Arab, North Indian and West African societies. My local neighborhood in San Francisco, the Castro district, is also a Level 5... mostly groups of men.
What would surprise most readers of this blog is that Japan would be a Level 3 or 4 society on this gender-cluster index. Japanese men and Japanese women do mix at college age, but rarely before or after that.
That is the main reason there are pink cars on commute trains. Japanese women prefer to be in the company of women.