by Kyoko Mori
We gravitate toward the settings we associate with home. I feel safe in big cities, not because I underestimate the crime rate, but because I know how to interpret what I see. A bad neighborhood looks like a bad neighborhood, in ways that I cannot explain to someone who doesn’t know. When I stop at a gas station because I am lost, I can tell whether this is the kind of place where I should park my car two feet from the door, run into the store, and ask the attendant for directions—or where I should get some gas, saunter into the store to buy a soda, and ask to use the bathroom. For someone who is afraid of big cities, all busy streets look equally threatening—just as all farmhouses look, to me, like places where a person would be bitten by big dogs.
While my sense of safety is influenced by my childhood familiarity with big cities, in an odd way I don’t feel as safe in Japan as everyone else seems to. I know how safe Japanese cities are, and yet I can never relax.
My relatives and friends feel as safe among strangers as among their close friends. When my aunt, my brother, and I got on a crowded commuter train in Osaka, she closed her eyes as soon as she sat down in the only seat that was open. All around her, people were standing shoulder to shoulder, their swaying bodies looming over her. Crammed against her narrow green seat, the side of her arm touching another woman’s, my aunt dozed. She wasn’t alone. At least half the passengers were sleeping. Businessmen in their dark suits were nodding and brushing against one another’s heads and shoulders, snoring comfortably together on their way to work. Many people had their eyes closed while standing up.
Surrounded by all the sleeping people, I gripped the handrail, trying to stand straight. Every couple of minutes, the train swayed sideways, pitching me against other people’s shoulders and hips. How can these people sleep in public? I wondered. Outside the windows, the dark green pines and cedars whipped by. The train rattled on, tossing the sleepers back and forth against one another. There was no privacy, and no one cared. Maybe people who did not grow up in Japan would witness this scene and think, How wonderful. Japanese people are like a big family. They can sleep on trains, trusting that no one will steal their money or harm them. But the scene made me feel closed in and afraid. When I sleep, dreaming about long-ago memories or some anxious event from the day before, I want to be alone. Sleep is intimate and personal—not something I want to share with strangers. Watching the others, I felt oppressed by what seemed like forced closeness or trust.
For me, crowded trains are the ultimate metaphor for Japanese society. Standing or sitting shoulder to shoulder, people sleep together, and yet they won’t make eye contact or start casual conversations. There is a forced closeness that doesn’t lead to true intimacy, communication, or even contact. Trains are also models of punctuality and orderliness—the high standard of Japanese discipline I was taught in grade school and rebelled against. Even more than that, I associate the trains with the period of my life when I was afraid of everything.
Many people say that they were fearless to the point of stupidity in their teens and early twenties. They attended wild parties and drove home drunk at dawn. “I did all kinds of stupid things,” they say, now in their thirties or forties, “because I was too young to be afraid. I never thought anything bad could happen to me. I was lucky that I didn’t get hurt.” They attribute their former daring to “stupidity,” “a false sense of immortality,” or having no family to look after. They are more cautious now, they claim, because they are smarter and have more responsibilities.
That isn’t how it was for me. I am much more relaxed and daring now than I used to be as a teenager. I still am not the kind of person who wants to jump out of airplanes, drive race cars, or get wildly drunk, but I can, if I have to, drive my car in a blizzard, confront someone who is angry or drunk, or come home at three in the morning and walk across a deserted parking lot to a dark apartment. I am not fearless, but I can overcome most unreasonable fears and act in a reasonable way: I am not afraid of everything the way I used to be as a teenager in a perfectly “safe” suburb in Japan.
One of the things I feared most at that time was coming home late at night. When I was eighteen, I taught English at a language school in Osaka two nights a week. After the class got out, I rushed to the station to catch the nine-fifteen train. Most nights, there were only one or two men in every car. From their black suits and white shirts, I knew that they were businessmen coming home from a late night at the office or from a drinking session with co-workers. I entered the car quietly and sat as far away from them as possible. Almost always, they were either sleeping or reading; their expressionless faces gave me the chills, especially if they were reading Manga—pornographic comic books that feature stories about women being raped, tortured, or murdered. Many businessmen read Manga on the train, and I had never heard of anyone assaulting women in real life because he had read these books. The men I saw on the train did not leer at me or look at me; still, I felt nervous and uncomfortable, knowing that they were looking at pictures of tied-up, naked women as we rode the same train.
When the train arrived in Ashiya, I ran to the cab stand outside to get in line. My neighborhood was supposed to be safe, and yet I was afraid to walk home in the dark. Once in a while, my friends and I heard stories about girls who had been raped while walking alone late at night. Girls like that lost their reputation. Even if they came from rich families who might try to keep the incident a secret, people always found out. These girls were marked for life. No matter how well they behaved for the rest of their lives, they would never be considered respectable enough to marry or have a good job. “What was she doing, walking late at night by herself like that?” people would always say about her.
But I was afraid of taking a cab, too. Getting into the back seat, I would mumble the address and the directions, my heart already beating faster. I sat bolt upright, as close to the door as I could, afraid of the silent cabdriver with his expressionless face—who could say that he was not going to turn out to be a murderer or a rapist? As the cab followed the familiar way home, I would relax about the driver, only to worry about getting home too late and being beaten by my father. My father and stepmother never gave me a specific curfew. Yet when I got home, my father might come to the door and hit me in the face for staying out too late, or he might be angry because my stepmother had complained to him about something I’d said or done. There was no telling, every night, what I might find once I got home.
I was afraid of everything, I understand now, because I felt so unprotected. If anything happened to me outside the home, people would assume it was my own fault. The whole society would dismiss me forever as a girl who had invited disaster by her own careless conduct. My friends, who had to be careful outside the home for the same reason, at least had a safe place to return to. My home was no sanctuary. I had no one to take care of me, to worry about me in the protective way my friends’ mothers did. If I was hurt by a stranger, my father and stepmother would be the first to blame me.
In my memory of those years, I am always taking the late-night train by myself. There is nothing between me and the dark streets outside except the fragile sheet of window glass. Trapped inside the train with businessmen—and their S&M fantasies—I am hurrying home toward people who won’t hesitate to hurt me.
On my last visit to Tokyo, I decided it was time to overcome my bad feelings about trains. I rode the subway to various neighborhoods I’d never visited before and was impressed by the convenience and the punctuality of the system. Though I was in Tokyo only a few months after the members of the Aum cult had released sarin gas on a crowded subway train, I did not worry about being poisoned, any more than I worry about airplane crashes and other catastrophes that are statistically unlikely to befall me.
But something happened on the trip to undermine my sense of security. One Sunday, I decided to take a train to Kamakura, a suburb about an hour from Tokyo. The trains that go to suburbs have their seats arranged so four people can sit together, two each on opposite seats
. Getting on the train, I took one of the few open seats, next to an old woman. Mine was the aisle seat and hers was the window. In typical Japanese fashion, she politely moved closer to the window to give me more room but said nothing. Avoiding eye contact, she craned her neck sideways to look out the window.
As the train started moving, I leaned back a little, trying not to stare at anyone or make rude eye contact. The seat facing me was occupied by two people. A woman my age was sleeping, leaning toward the window; she was wearing a brown kimono. Next to her—directly opposite me—sat a man in his late forties or fifties, wearing a white polo shirt and black pants. The woman and the man, I concluded, were not together—she was sitting as far away from him as possible, and also, they were dressed too differently to be going to the same place. To avoid staring at them and being intrusive, I looked out the window for a while, but the old woman’s head was in the way so I couldn’t see anything, and it seemed silly or maybe rude to be staring at the back of her head.
I turned back from the window and for the first time noticed that the man opposite me was scratching his crotch through his black pants. Embarrassed, I looked away. Even with my face turned away, I could not help but notice that he never stopped scratching, that his hand was moving up and down from his upper thigh, over his crotch, and then down again in a circular motion. When he noticed that I had noticed, he narrowed his eyes and leered. His gaze moved slowly from my legs, up my body, to my face, then back down. Next to him, the woman in the kimono continued to sleep; next to me, the old woman was still looking out the window, her upper body turned away from me. I could not tell whether the two women were really unaware of what was going on or if they were pretending not to notice. Maybe I was imagining this whole thing, I thought—surely, no one would sleep while a man masturbated right next to her. All I had to do was shift my eyes a slight amount to see him staring at me and touching himself while the woman in the kimono dozed, her eyes closed and her mouth open.
I did not confront the man or call the two women’s attention to what was going on. I did not even get up to find a different seat right away. I sat immobilized, averting my eyes. The two women’s unawareness added to my confusion and embarrassment. I felt that I was supposed to say nothing, to stay calm, and to do nothing until the train stopped. To disturb anyone—to embarrass them—was unthinkable. At the next station, I got up and walked to a different car. I looked back just in time to see the man get up and move in the opposite direction. He wasn’t getting off the train, which was moving again—he was going to a different car, for all I know, to masturbate in front of someone else.
As I sat down in my new seat, my heart was pounding. I glanced around me quickly to make sure that the man did not change his mind and decide to follow me. The car I was in looked just like the one I had left, crowded with sleeping men and women. The man had not followed me. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, but I could not relax.
The worst part of the incident was everyone’s silence, including—and especially—my own. Someone had masturbated right in front of me, using my body and my presence in a way that was absolutely degrading, and all I worried about was not causing a rude disturbance to the other passengers. I couldn’t get over the feeling of shame—I felt as though the whole thing was my fault somehow. For a few days, I was too embarrassed to talk about it. When I did, I found out that “minor” sexual assaults happen all the time on trains. A woman who lived in Tokyo all her life said that when she was in high school, on a late-night train, a man stood in front of her and began to masturbate.
“I was pretty young,” she said, “so I didn’t know what was going on at first. There were only two or three other people in the car. The girl who had been sitting next to me got up suddenly and left as soon as the man came over. I thought, ‘What a rude girl. Why doesn’t she want to sit next to me?’ Obviously, the other girl had realized what was about to happen. In a few minutes, I understood, too. I got up and walked to the next car.”
This woman didn’t seem to consider the event to be a particularly traumatic one. The man did not try to grab her as she stood up or follow her. She considered his actions to be offensive rather than threatening. But masturbating in front of someone is a form of sexual assault—the act is not simply distasteful but wrong and abusive. I was disturbed to hear that “minor sexual incidents” happen all the time on trains: men masturbating in front of women or even fondling their breasts and never being reported, much less apprehended. Women don’t talk about these incidents except to their close friends, and for the most part, they shrug and agree that weird men on trains are a source of nuisance—something they have to live with and not think about too much.
I continue to feel unsafe in Japan because of the way women are embarrassed or pressured into silence. I am afraid, not so much because of the “weird men” on trains, but because of the silence. My silence is my own fault. After just a few days in Japan, I lose whatever assertiveness or courage I learned as an adult; much of what I hoped was my adult “character” or “principle” is just the luxury of living elsewhere. If I lived in Japan, it wouldn’t take me long to accept and practice the polite silence everyone resorts to. That’s what I fear the most—a community of enforced silence, and the ease with which that kind of community can crush most people’s personal courage or assertiveness.
In Japan, polite communal silence assumes or implies a sense of safety—a woman sleeping on the train while her seatmate masturbates. She is supposed to stay quiet and not disturb the public peace because she is assumed to be in no “real” danger from the man. But not all situations that call for silence in Japan are so “harmless.” Sometimes, there are actual physical dangers, and still no one says anything.
While I was in Tokyo, I heard about a woman whose former boyfriend had threatened her.
“The guy came to her apartment at midnight,” a close friend of hers—a man I met on business—told me. “He pounded on the door and yelled at her. She told him to go away. He broke down the door, picked up her fire extinguisher, and sprayed foam into the doorway. Then he kept verbally abusing her. He didn’t hit her or physically harm her, but she was quite shaken. He said that he would come back again—that’s a threat, so she went to the police.” The man shook his head and sighed. “But the police were no good. They sided with the boyfriend and accused her of being a loose woman. The policeman who interviewed her asked many personal questions about her love life, all the time staring at her chest. He claimed that since she didn’t own her apartment, the damage her boyfriend caused was against her landlord, not against her—because of this, the policeman said, she would not be able to press charges. She went home in tears and called me.”
“What did you tell her?” I asked him.
“I didn’t know what to say. I gave her the number of the counselors at the Tokyo Women’s Center. She hasn’t called them yet.” The Women’s Center is a private organization that has various programs to help women.
“Can’t she go back to the police station and report this policeman to his supervisor?” I asked.
“No. Policemen always stick together. She’s afraid of getting on the wrong side of them. If she does, then she won’t have anyone to call if the guy comes back again. My friend wishes that she had never gone to the police. She was humiliated to be asked all these questions about her sexual history and to be told that she was a loose woman. ‘What do you expect?’ the policeman said to her. ‘No wonder your lover got angry. You should have been more upright.’”
The man who told me the story was afraid that the Women’s Center could do only so much, being a private organization with limited funds. People in Japan don’t hire attorneys to take one another—much less the police—to court. What his friend experienced was a fairly common occurrence.
“The best solution for her,” he said, “is to go to the media. The media are usually sympathetic to the plight of women. But I’m not sure if she can stand the publicity.”
I am not
naive about the police in the States. Like everyone else who owns a TV set, I saw the videotape of the police beating Rodney King, and I am disturbed by reported incidents of police brutality, racism, or incompetence. But in the small and safe town where I live, I certainly do not expect the police to beat me up if I were stopped for speeding. I would be shocked if a police officer scolded me or stared at my chest while I was reporting a crime.
I did once report a crime to the Green Bay police. A few years ago someone stole Chuck’s guitars from our living room because we didn’t lock the garage door. The two police “detectives” who came when we called 911 were pretty unhelpful: they came back two weeks later and showed us pictures of right-handed guitars and asked Chuck if those might be his—we had specifically told them that his were custom-made left-handed models. The police never found the guitars or caught the thieves. But they did not scold us for having failed to lock the garage door. If they had, we would have been outraged—even though it was our fault that we hadn’t locked the door.
It didn’t take us too long to get over whatever bad feelings we had about the theft. The “crime” didn’t make us feel unsafe in our house. The thieves took nothing else and apparently had no intention of harming us or our cat. We talked rather flippantly about how our house was the site of the only crime that had taken place in our neighborhood in the last thirty years—after a while, the incident became one of our favorite anecdotes. But if we had been discouraged from talking about the incident or told that the theft had been our own fault, it would have been a different story: we would have felt unsafe.
The key to all my fears is silence. I feel uneasy in Japan because we are supposed to say nothing about whatever threatens our safety: from perverts on trains to family abuse or midnight break-ins by old boyfriends. Behind the smooth and quiet surface, I sense danger. The well-groomed businessmen on late-night trains, their heads bent over sadomasochism comic books, are emblematic of everything I fear in Japan. Even though they are most likely harmless to me, I can never be sure. I do not understand how someone could read violent and misogynous fantasies and still remain calm, polite, well-groomed, perfectly “nice.” The silent, smooth surface is what gives me the creeps.