Sexual assault on public transport: crowds, nation, and violence in the urban commons

ABSTRACT

This article investigates sexual assault on commuter trains in Tokyo to unravel the folk theorizing that passengers engage in to make sense of sexual violence in the urban commons. Through what everyday conceptual work do commutersconstitute sexual violence on transit systems as a persistent aspect of city life? The discussion identifies national cultural discourses of gender and city crowds as key explanatory categories through which commuters diagnose and grapple with sexual violence on mass transit. Scenes of sexual assault on commuter trains in Tokyo bespeak the need for geographical analysis of stranger violence to articulate itself from the intersections between urban forms and manifestations of the nation in cities. By tracing these social relations on-the-move, the article highlights the value of bringing feminist studies of violence into dialogue with a sociology of urban crowds and critical geographies of public transportation. First, a focus on urban form reveals how the social properties of mass transit mediate violent intimacies between strangers in the city. Second, precisely because violence produces social knowledge by discriminating between people, analysis of sexual assault on public transport enables a more precise conceptualization of the links between passengering and urban social inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban
• mobilities
• nation
• everyday
• transport
• violence

A girl. Japanese. Lives in Tokyo. She is 14, perhaps 15. She uses the train daily to go to school and return home. As she stands in the crowded train compartment one morning, she senses the hand of a stranger touching her hip. She is instantly uneasy; a bit confused. The hand then moves to her behind and begins to caress her. She feels her heart racing with fear; but is unable to protest, or ask for help. So many adult men in the train carriage, who would help her? In the crowd, she is unable to identify who is touching her. It is no small relief when her station arrives and she alights from the train, to make her way to school.

This happens to her almost every day. With time she develops some strategies to protect herself. She hangs her school bag in front of her to prevent men from touching her breasts. She tries to find a corner in the compartment, where she can rest her back against a wall, so that some parts of her body remain out of reach. She speaks to her girlfriends in school and they all have a similar story to narrate.

30 years. That girl is now in her mid-forties. She still lives in Tokyo, she still travels by train regularly. If she takes the train five times in a week, she is groped three times. But something in her has shifted in this phase of her life. Earlier she did not have the courage to refuse what she did not want. It is not something Japanese people, especially women, do. Through her life in a German city, she has learnt that it is alright to refuse. So now in Tokyo, when she is sexually assaulted on the crowded trains, she protests. She still may not be able to identify who groped her but she speaks out, nevertheless. She asks loudly, ‘What did you do? Why did you do that? Stop it!’

30 more years. That girl who was once 14, who was once 44, is now in her 70s. She still takes the train occasionally. But after she turned 50, she noticed that she no longer had to deal with unwanted sexual touch on Tokyo’s commuter trains. She feels relieved but knows that younger women continue to face what she did before.¹

Introduction

The barrier posed by sexual assault to women’s access to the resources of urban living has been an enduring concern in feminist urban geography. A thread in the wide-ranging analyses of violence in cities offered by feminist scholars has focussed on the particularities of sexual assault on public transport and their ramifications for how everyday mobilities in cities are understood. This paper investigates sexual assault on commuter trains in contemporary Tokyo to unravel the folk theorizing that passengers engage in to make sense of sexual violence in the urban commons. Through what everyday conceptual work do commuters, as gendered urban subjects, constitute sexual violence on transit systems as a persistent aspect of city life? In attending to how commuters account for the phenomenon of sexual assault on public transport, the article identifies the nation and city crowds as key explanatory categories through which commuters experience and narrate sexual violence on urban mass transit systems. By tracing these social relations in the context of urban Japan, the article highlights the value of bringing feminist studies of sexual violence into dialogue a sociology of urban crowds and critical accounts of public transport geographies in cities.

Since the 1980s, feminist geographers have interrogated male privilege as a structuring principle of cities and demonstrated how the threat of sexual and physical assault forces women to map geographies of fear and devise strategies for staying safe in the urban outdoors (Pain, 1991; Valentine, 1989; Yeoh & Yeow, 1997). Within this broader concern with gendered access to public space, analyses of sexual assault on urban public transport have highlighted a specific set of issues. These relate to the social factors which inhibit women from exposing sexual offenders in Kathmandu (Neupane and Chesney-Lind, 2014), the effects of sexual assault on women’s transport choices in North American cities (Loukaitou-Sideris & Fink, 2009), and women’s appropriation of sartorial impositions to lay claim on Tehran’s subway system (Bagheri, 2019), to public debates on the introduction of women-only train carriages in Mexico City (Dunckel Graglia, 2016), the absence of basic amenities such as toilets, waiting areas, proper lighting in transport zones in Kolkata (Parichiti and Jagori, 2012), and the vulnerability of transgender persons while waiting for buses in Portland (Lubitow et al., 2020). There is a relationship between the kind of sexual harassment and the density of transit environments: Overcrowded buses might facilitate unwanted sexual touching, whereas rape is more likely at an empty bus stop (Ding et al., 2020). Sian Lewis et al. (2020) have pointed out that the bulk of research on this social problem has been on cities in the Global South and present their recent study of sexual violence on the London Tube as an initial redressal of the near-complete absence of feminist scholarship on gender-based violence on public transport in northern cities.

Through an empirical focus on sexual assault on commuter trains in Tokyo, this article extends Lewis’s call by investigating the problem in the context of a non-western city in the global north. In doing so, the ensuing discussion underscores the need for studies of gender-based violence in cities and on public transport to take greater cognizance of social context in how such violence is understood by everyday urban actors and social geography. Partially in response to the challenge of intersectionality, social geography has recently renewed attention to the salience of ‘social context’ – which is to say, historical lineages, social institutions, and contestations of culture – in how social phenomena are researched within the discipline (Hopkins, 2019). This article shows that contextually embedded folk explanations which commuters use to grasp sexual assault on public transport generate new units of analysis for feminist urban geographers. It simultaneously spurs transport geographers to enlist feminist theories of violence to understand mobility inequality in cities by demonstrating what studies of violence on public transit can contribute to geographical understandings of passengering.

The pursuit of such an exercise in this article is informed by three theoretical approaches. First, following feminist studies of violence, it gives analytical primacy to the interpretive frameworks used by everyday social actors to discern stranger violence in the urban commons. Feminist violence studies has offered the crucial insight that the conceptual frames used to name different kinds of gendered and sexual violence are intertwined with how violence is both diagnosed and explained (Das, 2008; Hearn, 2012). These conceptual frames pertain equally to academic epistemologies as to explanatory categories used by ordinary people – or folk theories – and capture the mundane discourses through which violence is authorized and regulated by cultures. Feminist analyses have been particularly mindful that violence intersects with other social forces, such as politics, the state, the economy and culture in ways that make it simultaneously intimate and geopolitical (Pain & Staeheli, 2014). In this article, such a theoretical attentiveness to the conceptual frames of everyday urban actors facilitates national cultural discourses of gender to emerge as an explanatory lens for stranger violence on mass transit, thereby allowing us to grasp the salience of nationhood in the domain of interpersonal- and not just institutional violence in the city. The second theoretical provocation for this article is the ‘mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006), specifically the call to heed representations, ideologies, and meanings of movement and stillness, and their imbrication with the normative question of mobility justice. The discussion here aligns itself with the mobilities paradigm’s emphasis on criss-crossing societal borders that recast the intersections of region, city, and place (Urry, 2010) to demonstrate how nation, gender, sexual desire, and mobility take shape in urban form. And finally, this article draws on and contributes to the sociology of crowds, especially its urban articulations. While not central to their oeuvres, both Simmel and Durkheim have offered productive conceptualizations of the crowd, which have subsequently been developed to explore collective life in cities. While Simmel and Durkheim both underscore the de-individualizing effects of the crowd and its potentiality for violence, for Simmel the crowd also embodies a vitalist, life-affirming force (Borch, 2010), whereas for Durkheim it conjures a collective moral force with social transformative energies (Torres, 2014). The ensuing discussion derives its analytical vocabulary from these contemporary reassessments of the sociology of crowds, while leavening it by geographical formulations of passengering (Adey et al., 2012; Watts, 2008). Such an orientation facilitates a bidirectional flow of analytical inspiration, allowing sexual assault in cities to be interpreted in relation to a sociology of urban crowds, while demonstrating how feminist evaluations of stranger violence deepen geographical understandings of mass transit in cities.

The folk theorizing of sexual assault offered by commuters in Tokyo – a glimpse of which is presented in the interview vignette at the start of this article – suggests that national cultural discourses of gendered identity and the high density of train travel in the city are inalienable from the problem of sexual assault because the social life of crowds in transit zones is fundamental to Japan’s urban modernity. In what follows, I describe my methodological approach, lay out the broader social context of sexual assault on trains in Tokyo, and then demonstrate how national cultural valuations of gender and the compression of mass transit travel mediate sexual violence in the mobile city.

The article is based on in-depth interviews with seven women and five men, all between the ages of 20 and 74, who live in Tokyo and commute regularly on the city’s massive train network. This group of interlocutors – selected because for them the experience of sexual assault on trains is particularly lacerating² – was identified from 32 people who I interviewed in Tokyo through July and August 2019, about traveling on commuter trains in the city. Interviewees were also selected bearing in mind demographic trends and socio-economic characteristics peculiar to Tokyo and urban Japan. Thus, I interviewed single women, salarymen, those in part-time service jobs, older women, and migrants in Tokyo from other regions in Japan, as well as from other countries. Each respondent was asked at least 30 questions, which were thematized in three categories: 1) descriptive, 2) explanatory, and 3) predictive. Respondents were urged to describe instances of sexual assault in commuting spaces, which they either experienced themselves, witnessed, or heard; to explain what they thought are the reasons for the prevalence of groping on trains and their reactions to it; and predict how this urban social problem is likely to evolve in the near future.

The ethical problems of fieldwork-based research with survivors of sexual abuse, especially what has been characterized as the revictimization hypothesis (Burgess-Proctor, 2015), were minimized by repeatedly asking women respondents if they were comfortable with these questions, stressing that they could stop or redirect the conversation at any moment, withdraw their narratives from the project at any time, without explanation, and stressing my experience in researching issues of gender and commitment to feminist principles as a cis-gender male researcher. Interviews were conducted in Japanese, English, Hindi, or Bangla. While I alone conducted the interviews in English, Hindi, and Bangla, the Japanese interviews were done with the help of 2 Japanese women interpreters who are proficient in both Japanese and English. I was told by them that respondents spoke to me far more candidly than they ordinarily would with an ethnic Japanese researcher because I was read as a foreigner; interviewees both felt more at ease to divulge the details of sexual assault in their urban lives, knowing that as a South Asian researcher then based in the UK, we do not inhabit the same social circle, and culturally obliged to be more accommodative of my questions as a gesture of hospitality to visitors in Japan. Thus, respondents accommodated interviews ranging from 1 to 2.5 hours.

Sexual assault on Tokyo’s trains

Sexual assaults on women on public transport have to be placed in the context of women’s experiences of violence in the broader public sphere in Japan. The patriarchal coding of sexual violence laws and judicial narratives during trial means that gender-based assault is both underreported and trivialized (Burns, 2004). Women politicians in the country, for instance, routinely signal the sexual and symbolic violence they are inflicted with in the form of fondling, prostituting and gender stereotyping (Dalton, 2017). Although the term ‘sexual harassment’ (sekushuaru harasumento) was first used in Japan in the late 1980s, it wasn’t until 1997 that the Equal Employment Opportunity Law in Japan was amended to include a statute prohibiting sexual harassment at the workplace (Huen, 2007). Japanese cultural emphasis on group harmony (wu) construes sexual violence as a private matter and partially explains the relatively meagre impact that the MeToo movement has had in Japan compared to other East Asian countries such as South Korea (Hasunuma & Shin, 2019). Since the violence of sexual harassment is overlooked in favour of the importance of forging group harmony, survivors of sexual harm find themselves in a cultural climate where their experiences are likely to be invalidated.

While criminological research shows that women traversing Japanese city streets are safer from stranger violence than those in several western cities (Kersten, 1996), sexual assault of women in train carriages and stations is a pervasive social problem in Tokyo. According to data maintained by the National Police Agency, in 2018 there were some 2800 reported cases of ‘molestation’ inside train carriages (Tokyo Reporter, 2020). A survey by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police in collaboration with and JR Railway Company, in the early 2000s, found that two-thirds of women in the age group of 20–40 reported experiencing sexual assault on crowded trains. State functionaries, civil society organizations, and individual actors have initiated a range of measures to grapple with this form of gender-based violence in Tokyo’s commuter zones.

In 2009, ‘anti-groping cameras’ were fitted in Tokyo’s trains to identify episodes of sexual abuse. Reports suggest that in the same period, as many as 6,000 men were arrested for alleged sexual assault or image-based sexual harassment (BBC 2019). The Tokyo Metropolitan Police’s efforts to curtail harassment inside trains include the creation of a smart-phone application called ‘Digi Police’ that shouts ‘Stop it!’ and emits a message saying, ‘There is a molester. Please help.’ A number of anti-groping devices aimed at tackling sexual harassment on Tokyo’s commuter trains have filled the market (The Economist 2019). One such device allows users to imprint their assailants with an invisible ink stamp in the shape of a hand. CNN (2019) reported that on the first day that some 500 stamps were made available for purchase, they sold out within 30 minutes. A website called Chikan Radar has been designed to help train passengers track areas in the commuter train network that report high incidence of groping (The Mainichi 2019). Rail companies in Japan have also responded to such sexual violence. JR East has designed an application that enables users who are being groped on the train to send a notification to the train conductor (Tokyo Reporter 2020). Although many women have embraced the introduction of such mobile application to deal with instances of sexual abuse on public transport, some feminists have cautioned that such technology could place additional burden on individual women without initiating systemic change (White & McMillan, 2019).

The incorporation of sex-segregated public transport has a specific history in Japan (Horii & Burgess, 2012). In post-War Tokyo, between 1947 and 1973, the Chuo Line in the city had women and children-only carriages; this was arranged to protect them from the chaotic passenger crowds (The Mainichi 2020). The call for more widespread women-only carriages as a measure to deal with routine sexual harassment on trains gained strength when in 1988 – in what came to be known as the ‘Midosuji incident’ – a woman was followed and raped by a man after she had protested him groping another woman on a train. Following this widely reported attack, several women’s rights organizations demanded safety for women on commuter trains in Tokyo. The drunken salaryman – usually middle-aged (oyaji) – emerged as a figure that women reported being wary of, as especially likely to assault women co-passengers, itself an index of the complex social status of the salaryman, from key architect of the nation to an object of ridicule. As a backlash against this attention to sexual assault on women on trains in Tokyo, the mid-1990s saw the mainstream media taking reactionary positions by highlighting false accusations of groping on trains (The Mainichi 2020). Since the 2000s, women-only carriages became a growing presence in Tokyo, as the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism urged rail companies to incorporate such measures. Several of my women respondents in Tokyo said that they actively avoid carriages reserved for women because they feel sensorially overwhelmed by perfume and frustrated at being stepped on by pointy heels in congested spaces. Some younger women also expressed an ageist frustration at the alleged irritability of older women as being another reason why they avoid women-only train carriages.

Notwithstanding these efforts – ranging from technological innovation, and changes in transportation rules, to expanding women’s access to legal redress – sexual assault on trains in Tokyo persists. This sometimes leads individual actors to develop creative means of surviving the everyday violence of train travel. In 2015, a girl in her teens, exhausted by futile interactions with the police and train authorities about curbing harassment, began hanging a sign on her bag that read ‘Groping is a crime. I will not cry myself to sleep.’ (The Economist 2019). This story resonated with another woman and inspired her to crowdfund an initiative to produce such badges for women.

Scenarios in which woman commuters are groped by male passengers on trains recur in erotic popular cultures of urban Japan. In ero manga (erotic comics for men), high school girls getting groped on trains is a recurring visual and narrative trope. This scenario has also made its way into erotic fiction in English. Chikan: Taken in Public on the Morning Train (2013) describes a woman in a crowded rush-hour train in Tokyo, crushed between men who repeatedly grope her, who ends up ‘wet, exposed, spanked, all before 9 a.m.’ Japanese heterosexual pornographic videos often portray women, typically in school uniform, being groped by and having sex with one or several men inside train carriages. Such erotic media are in line with a long tradition of orientalist portrayal of sexual culture in Japan as perversion normalized (McLelland, 2015).

Nation and gender in the urban commons

From the mid-1990s, considerable social scientific scrutiny has been directed at how the nation as a categorical identity takes shape in the banal minutiae of life (Billig, 1995), thereby making it possible to detect the presence of nationhood in social settings previously thought to be impervious to its influence. It is worth asking how the nation configures the social geographies of mass transit and the gendering of city life. In conversations with my interviewees in Tokyo, ideas about the cultural markers of Japanese national identity were repeatedly invoked to explain aspects of urban culture generally and sexual assault on public transport in particular. The figure of the girl in school uniform emerged as particularly vulnerable to sexual violence on commuter trains. A Japanese woman in her 50s, who works in a public company in Tokyo, remembers: ‘When I wore a school uniform, I was touched in an inappropriate way. I really didn’t like it, of course. In the past, I couldn’t get on the train because of these kinds of people. After high school, I didn’t wear school uniforms and it stopped. Another Japanese woman in her 40s, a social worker, recounts with great shock: ‘It was when I was 13 or 14 years old, quite young, going to school. Somebody, a guy, was standing in front of me, touched my boobs. But I was 13! I was just a kid!’ My women interlocutors shared clear-sighted theories about the especial vulnerability of schoolgirls to groping. The 74-year-old woman, excerpts from whose narrative is documented at the start of this article, theorizes: ‘The Japanese salaryman has a peculiar relationship to the person in uniform. Because of the harsh working life in Tokyo, men have too much pent-up anger towards authority. The girl in school uniform is an attraction to the salaryman because accosting her is like speaking back to the power of the uniform that tyrannises him.’ The woman in her 40s, explains: ‘The gropers are looking for girls who are wearing uniforms. This is because they feel they are conquering them. In Japan, many people, especially the salarymen, live under lots of pressure, for their work in the office and in their family lives’.

In these assessments of sexual assault of schoolgirls in transit spaces, Japanese women identify a male heterosexual ethos, with antecedents in the early 1900s, that intensified in urban Japan through the 1970s and 1980s and remains prevalent in present-day Tokyo. Lida (2002) writes that in this period, the Japanese sex industries marketed an image of sexual innocence through the figure of the pre-pubescent and teenaged high school girl. One manga genre, the rorikon (Lolita Complex), was built around eroticized portrayal of school-age girls. In Tokyo, a ‘junior idol’ industry which prints images of Japanese and Caucasian child models in erotic poses enjoys considerable popularity (McLelland, 2015). The early 1990s saw the establishment of sex shops specializing in used underwear of teenaged girls. Moreover, since the 1980s, Japanese popular culture has witnessed the emergence of kawaii or a cute aesthetic that values the innocent, the inexperienced, and the child-like in both people and cultural products (Kinsella, 1995). In this cultural climate, girls and young unmarried women in Japan are often seen as emblems of freedom that men trapped in corporate strictures resent and crave (Ibid). In explaining the vulnerability of girls in school uniform to sexual abuse on Tokyo’s commuter trains, women highlight the manner in which two discourses – the adoration of cuteness and the salaryman’s subjection to oppressive social rules in work and family life – mediate Japanese men’s impulse to sexually assault schoolgirls in Japan’s transit spaces. It is relevant here to note a politics of race that underlies such everyday understandings of nation and gendered violence on mass transit. Since the 1970s, the myth of racial homogeneity has shaped the making of Japan’s national identity by which ‘Japanese’ is constructed as a race in itself, set against indigenous groups such as Ainu and migrants such as Koreans and Chinese (Yamashiro, 2013). While studies of street harassment in western urban contexts note that women’s self-preservation strategies include creating a hierarchy of dangerous men in which racialised minorities, foreigners, and lower classes feature prominently (Gardner, 1995), in Japan precisely because certain cultural ideals of Japaneseness are identified as factors enabling sexual assault on mass transit, it is the middle-class man belonging to the majority ethnic group who is considered the most likely offender.³

My interlocutors also drew attention to the premium placed on feminine endurance in Japanese culture to explain the resilience of groping on Tokyo’s trains. The 74-year-old woman said, ‘People in Tokyo take crowds as their destiny and give up struggling against it. This is a special power that Japanese people have, to give up. They find themselves in this crowded environment, and only think of how they can deal with the situation then and there. The way of Japanese people, especially women, is to ignore and endure.’ While endurance is valued in both genders, for Japanese women it colludes with the trivialization of sexual assault in patriarchal cultures (not just in Japan) to keep them from vocalizing protest in the urban commons. Indeed, on the matter of protesting sexual abuse on trains, most Japanese women registered enormous discomfort with causing ructions in public. Socialization in Japan, especially in late childhood, stresses the importance of endurance (shinbo) in character development. The capacity to endure is vital to the creation of group identity in Japan (Moeran, 1989). Cultural pedagogy on Japanese femininity underlines the moral value of quiet endurance in women and the ability to submit to extenuating circumstances is projected as a life skill (Lebra, 1984). The value of endurance was a key component of the ‘good wife, wise mother’ rhetoric of national identity which emerged in post-war Japan and remains influential today.

The apprehension that something worse will happen if women complain about being sexually harassed on the train further discourages women them from raising their voices in protest. Women’s anxious anticipations of the outcome of complaining about being sexually assaulted on trains relate both to transgressing norms of social propriety and the likelihood of further violence. For instance, some women expressed fear that if they call attention to groping, the train might be temporarily stopped, thereby interrupting the tightly managed schedule of commuter trains in Japan and delaying office goers. The value attached to punctuality in working life in urban Japan (especially, in the running of the train network) and the social costs of interrupting it, curtail women’s desire to complain about sexual assault on mass transit. Another woman remembered with horror, ‘One time, this woman who was groped inside a train pointed to a male passenger and said, “This person is a groper”. The groper became defiant and said, “Why would I touch someone ugly like you?!”. I saw this happening in front of me. The guy shouted, “get off!” and kicked her!’

Feminist violence studies has recuperated from the everyday not simply how sexual violence unmakes social worlds, but also how women remake them in the aftermath of violence (Das, 2008). The exaltation of endurance as a disposition in Japanese culture diminishes women’s capacity to oppose sexual violence in transit zones, but it also supplies them with the philosophical terms to lay claim on urban resources. Women often strategize to expand their life options within the constraints set by the patriarchal context which they inhabit, in what has influentially been conceptualized as ‘bargaining with patriarchy’ (Kandiyoti, 1988). The idea of endurance denies Japanese women the voice to protest but it is also utilized by women as a discourse they can draw on to continue to access the urban commons. Both these discursive effects – i.e. silence and conditional access – on women’s experiences of sexual crime on-the-move, transpire within the broader rubric of Japanese patriarchy.

While some of my male interlocutors identified the social sanction for ‘seedy’ male heterosexual practices in urban Japan – such as renting hotel rooms designed to re-enact the groping fantasy on trains – as a cause of this social problem, others pointed to a national culture that emphasizes sexual restraint. A Vietnamese-American man in his early 20s, a university student, said, ‘I think women are just treated like garbage here. A very popular element in Japanese pornography is rape fantasy!’ He added: ‘People feel life here is so mundane, just work, not much else, so they treat groping as entertainment.’ A Japanese man, also in his early 20s, said, ‘Groping happens because Japanese people are very shy about sex, they hide these urges inside them, unlike foreign people. That makes things stressful.’

The identification of particular vectors of male heterosexual desire – from the peculiar to the repressed – to explain sexual assault on women in public resonates with orientalist constructions of Japanese sexuality as either perverse or muted (McLelland, 2015). However, the link that is identified between boredom, oppressive expectations at the workplace, and groping as a form of male heterosexual entertainment gestures towards a folk sociological understanding of salaryman masculinity’s relation to sexual crimes in transit spaces. Post-WWII Japan’s efforts at national rebuilding proceeded through a relentless pursuit of industrial capitalism which became axiomatic for individuals, families, and organizations. In this climate, the salaryman emerged as a valued form of masculinity, a male type that expressed lifelong devotion to his company and his provider role in the family (Dasgupta, 2000). As the pursuit of these goals and the pressures they engendered increasingly created a sense of futility in the salaryman, scholars writing in the 1980s noted a new social trend of middle-class Japanese men preferring to seek sexual fulfilment through commercial sex rather than with a girlfriend or wife (Allison, 1994). A widespread understanding of groping as a type of male sexual entertainment, captures both the social legitimacy that some forms of violence have in Japanese culture as a form of play (asobi)⁴ and the social indulgences afforded to the salaryman for being a key architect of nation-building in Japan. In these ways, culturally imposed attachments to national identity serve to normalize sexual violence in transit zones.

The gendered aspects of national culture – robustly developed in studies of sexual violence in domains such as war and ethnic conflict – has remained unremarked in feminist geographies of gender-based violence in cities. In studying sexual violence in cities, it bears scrutiny that modes of urban transport are often discursively tied to national identity, for instance, the association of London’s black taxis with Britishness, cycling as a Dutch national heritage in the Netherlands, and the rail system as an emblem of Japanese urban modernity (Freedman, 2011). The discussion of everyday discourses of ‘Japaneseness’ in this sub-section demonstrates how the tethering of the nation to transport systems implicates sexual violence in the urban commons and mobility opportunities for women in the city.

Sexual politics of commuter crowds

Grappling with sexual assault on trains in Tokyo necessarily entails reacting to the commuter crowd. Many women spoke of trying to always stand behind a male co-passenger on a crowded train. They hug their bodies or hold a bag near their breasts or wear thick garments to prevent male passengers from touching them. Some women with flexible working hours said they avoid getting on a train during rush hours. In living with the threat of sexual violence in Tokyo’s hyper-dense mass transit system, commuters unravel for themselves a sexual politics of the commuter crowd. A 20-year-old Chinese woman, who works part-time in the hospitality industry, expresses the difficulty in identifying certain physical contact as sexual abuse in a compressed train environment: ‘It gets confusing at times, you feel something rubbing against your body as the train speeds along, but you can’t always be sure if it’s deliberate or because there is just no room to keep distance.’ Women point out that male commuters make full use of the obscurity lent by the crowded trains to grope women passengers. The 74-year-old Japanese woman explains: ‘The crowd obscures his identity, he is one among so many, hence the train carriages are so rife with sexual harassment’. The indistinction between the groper and the mass of passengers on a densely packed train, captures the abundance of male sexual threat for women and the synonymity of sexual assault with the commuter crowds: in a highly compressed train carriage where identification is difficult, every male passenger is a potential groper.

Some men I spoke to also registered a keen awareness of women’s difficulty in accurately identifying their harassers in crowded transit zones. A 28-year-old Japanese man, who works part-time in an ice-cream parlour in Tokyo, spoke sensitively: ‘I always hear stories from women about getting groped. At first, they don’t notice or think it was just an accident. Then later they realize that it wasn’t an accident. It must be so hard to decide! I feel so bad that this happens.’ Other men stressed that given the pervasiveness of groping, it is their responsibility to clearly signal to women co-passengers that they represent no threat. A 24-year-old Japanese man, who works as a manager of a telecommunications store in Tokyo, says: ‘If you are a man and standing near a woman you should raise your hands to reassure the woman that you are not doing anything wrong. If you have a bag, put it in front. If you are holding the railing with one hand, put the other hand on the bag so that everyone can see both your hands.’ In these bodily strategies of male passengers, the cloak of anonymity is deliberately abandoned with the purpose of distinguishing oneself from the mass of male passengers who are all potential assaulters. Several women acknowledge this as a welcome new trend that serves to partially assuage the constant threat of sexual violence.

Some male passengers, however, refused to acknowledge the widespread nature of sexual assault on Tokyo’s trains. A 42-year-old man from Dhaka, who has lived in Tokyo for well over a decade and works in a trading company, reasoned: ‘In the crowds it is very normal that there will be touch between bodies. Now if this is construed as harassment then there isn’t very much that one can do.’ Some male passengers use the unavoidable proximities of the commuter crowd as an alibi and invalidate women’s experiences of sexual assault on rush-hour public transport. The Japanese man, in his early 20s, who otherwise acknowledged groping on Tokyo’s trains as a serious social problem deserving redress, also had this to say: ‘Sometimes obese men have problems. I haven’t seen in person, but this one case was all over the news some time ago. An overweight man was standing next to a young woman and she thought he was groping her in the train. The man did not do anything.’ The Bangladeshi man quoted above, continued: ‘A guy from Bangladesh I know well. He is not badly behaved. One day, we heard that the police have questioned him for groping a woman on the train. When we asked him, he said while getting off the train he had just brushed against some woman accidentally. Some women do this here in Tokyo; they use the law to blackmail men.’ Both these narratives create discursive strategies for rescuing men from charges of sexual assault in the urban commons: The first of these strategies uses the ambivalence of touch in a highly dense urban site to exonerate men, but without incriminating the woman commuter. The second strategy manufactures the innocent male passenger as a vulnerable figure, susceptible to the manipulations of a particular model of urban femininity: In crafting an image of the guileful woman in the city, crowded spaces are portrayed as a site of urban danger for men.

Although the touch of strangers on some occasions might indeed be difficult for women commuters to read confidently in a packed train carriage, some forms of physical contact leave no doubt about the intentions of male co-passengers. A Japanese woman in her 50s recounts: ‘I was about to start running while getting off the train, since I was going to be late for my work; someone who was standing next to me in the train just grabbed my breast! It was very crowded, but I immediately knew who had done it: it was a salaryman.’ Women also explain how the density of transit environments relates to sexual arousal between passengers. A woman in her 40s said, ‘There’s somebody next to you, so close, you and them both might have sexual feelings from being so near. Usually people have … I don’t know how to say it, dirty minds; of course, I think everybody has it, they hide it. But in a crowded place, people think no one else can see it, they can just do it, take a chance.’ Co-habiting a transient urban setting in close physical range with a stranger and the anonymity bestowed by the temporality of the commute, create fleeting erotic possibilities that range from the consensual to the violent. In this recognition of the erotic charge of a crowded transit space, the possibility of consensual sexual interactions between co-passengers is identified. A woman in her 50s recalled being told by two or three of her male friends that they enjoy getting groped by women on a crowded train: ‘That woman was a young and beautiful lady and he said it felt good so he just stayed silent and let her touch him (laughs). I heard it from my friends. But then, both of these men are handsome. That’s the difference between men and women!’.

Two specifically urban characteristics of modern sexuality – especially the sexuality of urban masses – are the abundance of supply and the consumerism of being able to browse and choose desired sexual objects (Bech, 1998). In the accounts of these two women, we see two kinds of sexual politics of the crowd. The first narrative is gender neutral, steers clear of physical descriptions of beauty, and represents the queer potentialities of the crowd in allowing for consensual erotic encounters outside of heteropatriarchal kinship scripts. The second narrative – in line with a ‘hydraulic model’ of male sexuality in Japan that held the view that blocking men’s sexual desire would deplete their ability to work (McLelland, 2015) – reproduces a patriarchal idea of male heterosexuality that is always ready to sexualise encounters with women who approximate conventional standards of beauty.

Just as the cramped environment of dense places may create opportunities for male sexual predation in cities (Madan and Nalla, 2016), urban emptiness may just as well aid sexual crime against women and non-binary people (Ceccato & Loukaitou-Sideris, 2020). Indeed, women commuters were quick to point out that sexual assault in transit zones in Tokyo cannot be placed in a causal equation with crowded environments because sexual crime also happens in low-density spaces. A Japanese woman recounted: ‘I often sleep on the train and one day, I felt something here [points to her breasts]. It was not so crowded but somebody sitting next to me was touching my body. After waking up, I stared at him and he just walked away.’ Another Japanese woman in her 30s, who works as a dance teacher, said: ‘Men will put their hands up my skirt when I am waiting at a train station, or some drunk will come up to me and try to do something inappropriate. When people approach me at the station, it’s usually at night when it’s not crowded.’ Nevertheless, when asked about solutions to the problem of gender-based violence on public transport, many women reflected on urban design and suggested that widening the platforms to allow more physical space between commuters would help reduce incidents of assault, thereby signalling the association between crowded transit zones and the likelihood of sexual crime.

Feminist and queer scholarship has read the anonymity of urban life as allowing conditional freedom for marginalized social groups and shown how anonymity may be eschewed in favour of affirmative identity claims made possible by the opportunity structures of cities (Garber, 2000). This sub-section has drawn into conversation questions of urban anonymity and a sociology of commuter crowds to reflect on the characteristics of sexual violence in dense transport spaces. At the intersection of these two lines of inquiry, a set of gendered urban social relations – within which male sexual predation on public transport takes place – emerges into sight: high density of passengers and the increased likelihood of sexual assault; commuter crowdedness, the ambivalent intent of touch, and its use as a cover for groping; men’s cultivation of bodily tactics which abandon commuter crowd anonymity to reassure women co-passengers; physical proximity, time-boundedness of the commute, and the potential for consensual erotic encounters between strangers on-the-move. Through these urban social relations of mass transit, a crew of social types (gendered passenger personalities, if you will) appear from the seemingly faceless commuter crowd: the scheming woman commuter, the beleaguered male who is her purported victim, the perpetually aroused male passenger, the cunning salaryman, the virtuous male passenger, and the hapless woman commuter. Such a typology signals how sexual assault on public transport, as a form of stranger violence, produces everyday knowledge about the commuter crowd and practices of shared mobility in the city. Sexual violence in mass transit distinguishes passengers from each other, endows the anonymity of the commuter crowd with differentiated identities, and creates an interpretive framework for urban actors to recognize gendered power among the throng of straphangers.

Conclusion

This article has drawn out some categories of thought that are put to work when everyday urban actors in Japan name an experience on mass transit as sexual violence. In doing so, it has foregrounded two modes of signification – nation and commuter crowd – through which sexual assault in city travel is represented and understood by passengers in the daily business of urban life. Sexual violence on public transport in urban Japan – when viewed in terms of the structure of ideas through which it is recognised and explained – emerges as a social problem in relation to national cultural discourses of gender and city crowds. Therefore, the principal contribution of this discussion lies in offering nationhood and the urban forms of mobility systems as explanatory lenses through which to make critical geographical sense of sexual assault in cities.

A thread in the history of urban inquiry in Japan was the ‘urban nationalism school’ of urban thought which considered Japanese cities as nodal points between communities and nation (Hashimoto, 2002). Historically in Japan, national development proceeded in tandem with the expansion of dense railway networks in cities as well as connecting city regions. Thus, the trajectory of urban modernity in Japan is inseparable from the history of the commuter crowd, both of which are fundamentally gendered. As one of my interlocutors evocatively put it: ‘People in Tokyo take crowds as their destiny … ’. The legitimating power of cultural nationalism to justify sexual violence against women, itself a robust theme in feminist research on the non-west (Chizuko & Sand, 1999), has seldom been considered in relation to gendered violence on public transport and the urban outdoors, more generally. If, as feminists have long argued, women’s bodies are often the ground for violent contestations of national identity (Hyndman & De Alwis, 2004), this article has unravelled how the ideological link between women, violence, and nation takes shape in quotidian spaces of the city. Thus, the discussion has brought into sight national cultural discourses of gender – the symbolic charge of the schoolgirl in her uniform, the prestige accorded to endurance in women, the role of salaryman masculinity in nation building, and the sanction for some forms of violence as a form of play – through which gender-based stranger violence in the city becomes intelligible. Studies of violence have typically been much more preoccupied with institutional violence than violence at the interpersonal level (Hearn, 2012). Recent geographical inquiries of intimacy and geopolitics have cautioned against separating everyday violence from violence in macro-institutional contexts to argue that they ought to be considered as intersecting social forces (Pain & Staeheli, 2014). In highlighting how national cultural discourses of gender mediate sexual violence on mass transit, this article has added to this line of inquiry by identifying the intersections between nation, gender, and violence at the scale of interpersonal encounters in the city. Furthermore, if the intimacy of violence resides not just in the interpersonal/private but also in the geopolitical/public (Pain & Staeheli, 2014), the discussion here has brought such feminist geographical insight into dialogue with urban mobility and crowd studies to show how the social properties of public transport systems mediate violent intimacies between strangers on the move.

In Japan, the expanding network of metropolitan rail was both tethered to the modernizing nation and created train carriage interiors as a new social site for urban interactions that were often deeply sexualized (Freedman, 2002). The sexual politics of commuter crowds captures the links between gendered violence in transit spaces and the social life of urban form. The difficulty of recognizing the intent of touch, women’s strategies of self-preservation, the alibis used by men to evade accountability, the diagnosis of commuter types, and the possibilities of consensual pleasure between passengers in transit spaces are all mediated by the socialities engendered by the compressed form of shared urban travel. In other words, the phenomenon of sexual violence in mass mobility systems in the city, when interpreted through a sociology of the commuter crowd, sheds light on questions of anonymity and sexual desire, density of bodies and urban atmospheres, social differentiations of mass passengers, temporality of being in passage and the urban sociabilities they generates. Violence produces knowledge by distinguishing between people, at the levels of the individual and social structure (Hearn, 2012), and hence an attentiveness to the micro-experiences of sexual violence is of considerable value to social studies of urban transport. Precisely because violence discriminates in order to produce an unequal social order in contextually specific ways, analytical focus on violence enables conceptualizing passengering in a way that is more attentive to social inequality.

This study has tried to advance geographical understandings of public transport and gendered violence by facilitating analytical exchanges between critical geographies of mobility, sociology of crowds, and feminist studies of violence. Of significant concern to cultural geographical theories of commuting are the characteristics that distinguish the mobile subjectivity of the passenger (Adey et al., 2012). By centring experiences of sexual assault, this article has highlighted some modes of being-in and becoming-with mass transit through which everyday violence constitutes commuting subjects. The ‘mobilities turn’, as we know, reorients social interpretation away from micro-macro dualities to focus on the betweenness of scales (Sheller, 2014). Seen through this critical lens, scenes of sexual assault on commuter trains in Tokyo bespeak the need for geographical analysis of stranger violence to articulate itself from the intersections between urban forms and manifestations of the nation in cities.

Acknowledgments

This article has benefitted greatly from discussions with Hung-Ying Chen, Roy Kemmers, and Colin McFarlane. I’m grateful to Mayuko Kawai and Mariya Yoshiyama for research assistance with translation, and to Toru Takeoka, Paul Waley, and Ritsuko Saito for advice and support with conducting fieldwork in Japan.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this paper was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 773209).

Notes

1. Written as a second-person narrative, this is an excerpt from an interview with a 74-year old Japanese woman, who reported her experiences of sexual assault on public transport in terms of these three distinct life phases. She currently lives with her German husband on the outskirts of Tokyo.

2. While nearly all my 32 interlocutors mentioned sexual assault on trains as a persistent problem of mass transit, in choosing to focus on 12 individuals for this article, I follow Hammersley and Atkinson’s (1993) suggestion about the strategic selection of ‘more-willing-to-reveal informants’ as a practical principle of ethnographic research.

3. For a discussion of how the politics of race and ethnicity intersects with mass transit in Tokyo, see, (Chowdhury & McFarlane, 2021).

4. See Ashkenazi’s (2002) discussion of sexual violence in manga.