lightgigantic
01-18-08, 03:14 PM
Japan sends hairy-chested 'harassment' off the rails (http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/japan-sends-harassment-off-the-rails/2008/01/18/1200620209073.html)
Barely a peep was raised from foreign media last week when JR East, the world's biggest train company, banned a poster featuring a man's moderately hairy chest — an image it considered so shocking to Japanese women that it constituted an open-and-shut case of sexual harassment.
This precedent, if it can be relied on as an accurate gauge of female tastes, surely poses the biggest threat of all to fuzzy foreign English teachers and bankers, many of whom were instantly rendered dangerous criminals by the ruling.
.....
Cases of sexual harassment on Japan's trains are so prevalent that eight private train operators and two of Tokyo's underground companies famously decided, in 2005, to introduce women-only carriages. Male commuters, terrified of being falsely accused of being chikan (gropers) in the push and shove of packed carriages, recently snapped up stocks of a fake subway strap, an innovation that niftily allows them to demonstrate to women that their hands are occupied. As yet, there's no help at hand for bear-chested foreigners inclined to loosen a shirt button or two and let it all out on a stinking hot subway train.
Few Japanese men are afflicted by chest growth. Those who are obviously don't dare show themselves in polite society.
"I don't think hairy David Hasselhoff is so popular here. It's true that some Japanese girls don't like chest hair or beards," says Karin Hashizume, a 25-year-old from Tokyo. "I know some Japanese boys who wax their feet, their legs — everything! They pluck their eyebrows too. Japanese idols (boy bands) often look like girls with big hair."
Is Japan caught in the rift of sexual-harrassmentaphobia or am I missing out on some edifying social constructs?
Barely a peep was raised from foreign media last week when JR East, the world's biggest train company, banned a poster featuring a man's moderately hairy chest — an image it considered so shocking to Japanese women that it constituted an open-and-shut case of sexual harassment.
This precedent, if it can be relied on as an accurate gauge of female tastes, surely poses the biggest threat of all to fuzzy foreign English teachers and bankers, many of whom were instantly rendered dangerous criminals by the ruling.
.....
Cases of sexual harassment on Japan's trains are so prevalent that eight private train operators and two of Tokyo's underground companies famously decided, in 2005, to introduce women-only carriages. Male commuters, terrified of being falsely accused of being chikan (gropers) in the push and shove of packed carriages, recently snapped up stocks of a fake subway strap, an innovation that niftily allows them to demonstrate to women that their hands are occupied. As yet, there's no help at hand for bear-chested foreigners inclined to loosen a shirt button or two and let it all out on a stinking hot subway train.
Few Japanese men are afflicted by chest growth. Those who are obviously don't dare show themselves in polite society.
"I don't think hairy David Hasselhoff is so popular here. It's true that some Japanese girls don't like chest hair or beards," says Karin Hashizume, a 25-year-old from Tokyo. "I know some Japanese boys who wax their feet, their legs — everything! They pluck their eyebrows too. Japanese idols (boy bands) often look like girls with big hair."
Is Japan caught in the rift of sexual-harrassmentaphobia or am I missing out on some edifying social constructs?