“Commuting is Rough”

Content note: This chapter discusses sexual harassment.

No sooner does Akira take leave of her brother than she has another unpleasant encounter. While she stands on the platform waiting to board a train to Fujigaya, a salaryman stands too close to her, an invasion of her personal space not justified by the area being overly crowded. She then notices another girl (Fumi, though Akira does not know this) and stands next to her for protection: “She’s so tall! I’ll stick close to her” (SBF, 1:13–14).

However, Fumi’s height does not protect her from harassment. Once on the train, someone (perhaps the same man?) gropes Akira and then Fumi. Fumi is too embarrassed to say or do anything, but Akira comes to the rescue, whacking the perpetrator with her schoolbag. Akira sympathizes with Fumi (“Commuting is rough, huh?”) and then accepts her thanks, after which Fumi takes her leave and walks away crying (SBF, 1:15–17).

Shimura’s audience would, of course, be familiar with the problem of men groping women and girls on trains (chikan), given its prevalence in Japan. In various surveys, over a quarter to up to seventy percent of Japanese young and adult women have reported experiencing groping. The problem is severe enough that several Japanese railway operators added women-only cars to their trains.¹

Akira and Fumi’s plight would also have been familiar to the schoolgirls of late Meiji-era Japan, whose lives gave rise to shōjo culture and Class S literature. As Japan’s economic growth led to an increase in Tokyo’s population and the creation of new suburbs to house new arrivals, railway operators built a series of rail lines to serve white-collar workers and others commuting to the city center.²

Schoolgirls also used these railway lines to travel from their homes to the rapidly expanding system of public and private high schools for girls. “From the last decade of the nineteenth century, the number of female students (jogakusei) increased, and the image of the teenage schoolgirl dressed in hakama, wearing hair ribbons, and traversing Tokyo or its suburbs on a bicycle or by train frequently appeared in popular literature and the mass media.”³

Commuter trains and streetcars brought together people of all classes and genders into a shared space: “Passengers holding different tickets rode together, and the train car became a travelling universe, grouping unrelated people for a brief moment. For the first time, men and women of various social classes were forced literally to look upon each other in new ways.” Not all of this attention was benign. In particular, “female students became both idealised as model modern women and eroticised as sexual objects. … their fashions and figures could be observed and even evaluated by other passengers on commuter trains.”⁴

The obsession of male commuters with commuting schoolgirls found literary form in Tayama Katai’s 1907 short story “The Girl Watcher.” The story chronicles the life of a man (an editor at a Tokyo publisher and former writer of girls’ literature) who spends his daily train journeys not looking at the scenery but instead finding ways to surreptitiously observe the young women who share his railway carriage. In his late thirties, married with two children, he neglects his wife, whom he thinks has “passed her prime,” though she is only in her mid-twenties. Instead he indulges in “this bad habit of getting obsessed with young women.”⁵

The story’s protagonist confines his activities to looking at the girls. For that, his friends condemn him as a coward: “Now if it was us, well, we wouldn’t be satisfied with just thinking about them—the force of instinct would soon raise its head, wouldn’t you say?” They speculate that “he couldn’t fool his instincts, so finally he had to resort to self-abuse for his pleasures,” and conclude that “you can’t live unless you follow your instincts!”⁶

Other men of the period thought the same, so much so that writers of the period warned parents not to let their daughters ride the trains during workers’ commuting hours. To preserve their innocence, a railway operator introduced a “Flower Train” (hana densha), designated “For Use by Women Only.”⁷

And so it went for the next hundred years, as new generations of schoolgirls had to deal with the unwanted attentions of new generations of salarymen and other male workers. Train groping goes unmentioned in Sweet Blue Flowers past the first chapter. However, it is no doubt an ongoing possibility during the daily commutes of Fumi, Akira, and their classmates, a low-level but ever-present hazard in their lives—as Akira is well aware: “I guess they target girls from Fujigaya” (SBF, 1:15).

Like rape, child sexual abuse, and related crimes, “chikan victimisation is likely to damage victims’ sense of self-control over their own environment and make them believe that they live in a dangerous world. This constructs women’s fear of crime victimisation greater than men’s … [and] discourages women from using public transport.”⁸

This discouragement has real consequences for the women involved. In another country with an even more severe problem with street harassment, women enrolling in university seek safety at the expense of their education. To have a significantly safer commuting route, they choose lower-quality colleges, ranked several places lower than the colleges that their entrance examination scores would otherwise qualify them for. They also pay much more in travel expenses to take safer commuting routes—up to twice what they pay in tuition.⁹

This puts women at an economic disadvantage: “Choosing a worse ranked college is likely to have long-term consequences since college quality affects a student’s academic training, network of peers, access to labor opportunities, and lifetime earnings.”¹⁰ Although Japan is overall safer for women, Fumi and Akira will likely also find that train groping and related street harassment impose an invisible tax that they must pay as women—a tax made more onerous because Fumi at least will likely never marry, and hence will not have the economic support of a husband.

Whether they intend to or not, train gropers also enforce a central patriarchal norm: every woman must ally with and commit herself to a “good” man to secure the protection of her person from “bad” men. For example, in the romantic comedy manga My Love Story!! (Ore monogatari!!), the brawny high-school student Takeo Gōda rescues the petite Rinko Yamato from a train groper, after which she falls for him and becomes his girlfriend.¹¹

Unlike his bishōnen friend Makoto Sunakawa, Takeo is not conventionally attractive. But his physical strength ensures that he can protect both himself and Rinko from people and things that might harm them. In contrast, Rinko cannot even defend herself and must always depend on Takeo.

When contrasting good and bad men above, I wrote “good” and “bad” in quotes because which men are good and which are bad can often be ambiguous. For example, My Love Story!! and many other manga and anime depict train gropers as clearly criminal, unattractive, perverse, and by implication set apart from the “good guys.”

But in Sweet Blue Flowers the man invading Akira’s personal space on the platform appears perfectly innocuous at first glance, just another typical salaryman on his way to work. Indeed he may act as a devoted husband and father at home, just as a man who jumps in to protect women on the train may beat his wife and children if they anger him.

By implication, Sweet Blue Flowers questions this division of men into “good” and “bad” and rejects the norm that a woman must ally herself with one man for protection from others. It is not a man who comes to the aid of the two girls, but rather Akira who acts to protect herself and Fumi—and recall that at this point in the story, Akira is coming to the aid of a girl otherwise unknown to her. To repeat what I wrote in the previous chapter, whether Shimura consciously intended this or not, the incidents on the station platform and the train, in combination with the actions of Akira’s brother (countered by Akira’s mother), serve “as an example of how women have reason to distrust men and turn to other women … in response for their protection.”