Ask John: What is Chikan?

Question:
I noticed in GTO and the Love Hina Christmas Special scenes that show men groping women on trains. Does this actually happen in Japan?

Answer:
Probably little known to most American anime fans, railway groping is actually a small scale epidemic in Japan. Japanese language even has a word for sexual harassment on trains. “Chikan” can refer to either the act of men groping women on trains, or the offending males themselves. Especially during rush hours in Tokyo and other major Japanese cities, subways and commuter trains can be packed to as much as 160% of capacity. With so many bodies condensed into such a small space and the tacit mandate that people should remain quiet during commuter train rides, it’s easy for Japanese men to sometimes take advantage of circumstances and grope essentially helpless female passengers. This seems to occur most often in the evenings when drunken business men are on their way home, and during the holiday season when men are more likely to stop at bars after work and ride the train home drunk. Reported cases of chikan can number well over a hundred annually, which is less than a fraction of a percent of the millions of Japanese women that ride commuter trains in Japan every year, but even a hundred instances is a hundred too many. The frequency of women receiving unwanted attention from strange men on commuter trains prompted East Japan Railways and Keio Electric Railway Company to create specific train carriages open only to female passengers during certain hours of each day, beginning in early 2001.

Chikan appears in anime including GTO and the Love Hina Christmas Special. It also occurs frequently in adult manga and anime titles including Shokuzai no Kyoushitsu, Tokio Private Police, and Bad End. And the hentai anime series Saishu Chikan Densha is entirely centered on sexual harassment and rape on public trains.