A Personal Story: Assault In Japan

This is going to be a personal one, a potentially upsetting one, a maybe you'll be kinda uncomfortable one, but it’s one I feel I need to write. I'm nervous about writing this, sharing this with the world at large. Not because I am ashamed, not because it upsets me, not because it's difficult for me to put into words. I’m nervous because I don't know how people will react to me presenting this topic in this manner.

“You don't need to worry, Japan's so safe!”

I've heard this so many times in the years I have lived here, mainly in reference to walking home at night or traveling around the country alone. And really, Japan is pretty safe if you consider major metropolitan areas around the world. But… it's not 100% safe. Especially if you're foreign.

If you look Asian, you can blend in, travel around undetected, and avoid most of the looks other non-Asian foreigners get daily. If you don't look Asian, however, you are going to stick out like a sore thumb no matter where you go. Always. Even in Tokyo. You're just going to. Which means you can often times attract very, very unwelcome attention.

The number of times I have been standing in a public area (usually waiting for a friend) and been approached by older Japanese men is far, far too many. Oftentimes they say nothing, just silently stare at me while intruding on my personal space until I feel so uncomfortable I just walk away. The number of times random people just come up behind me and try to talk to me as I'm waiting to cross the street is too many. Sure, they may be trying to be “friendly” but it's not. It's startling and makes me very uncomfortable.

I've also been physically assaulted while walking home at night.

This happened years ago, back when I was in my first year of living here in Yamaguchi, way on the other side of the country. I rarely went out drinking back then, it was about a twenty minute walk from my apartment to the main entertainment district and I didn't have many friends, so going out drinking wasn't something I did often. One night mid-February, however, I had been invited out. It ended up getting pretty dramatic thanks to an acquaintance and a crazy girl he was dating, so I was 100% sober on my walk home. I am so, so grateful for this fact.

It was around 2am, and I was sticking to the well-lit main roads for my walk. Ten minutes down this road and ten minutes down another. I was about two blocks from my apartment when I heard footsteps behind me and then felt hands grasp my arms. My first thought was that it was a friend I had just left, that they'd seen me walking home and wanted to surprise me. When I reacted the man grabbing me readjusted his grip so that he could hold me facing him and I realized I had no idea who this guy was.

He was middle-aged, he wore a baseball cap, he was in a track suit, he was nearly my height. He looked serious. He looked determined. He was saying some things in Japanese I didn't understand, but I guess were along the lines of, “wait, be quite.” I struggled to get free, he wouldn't let me go. His hand on my right shoulder moved down towards the hem of my dress (thankfully I had on legging as it was February) and at that point I used my newly freed right arm to grab his neck. In my mind I was ready to kill him if he didn't let me go, I squeezed as hard as I could.

His eyes bulged and he panicked, tried to grab my own throat but I had a scarf on so his hand never got a good grip. That's when I screamed. It was a noise I didn't know I could make, one I don't think I can ever make nor do I want to make again. He ran off, faster than I ever saw anyone one run, straight across the four lane road in five seconds and I stood there watching him retreat shaking, angry and confused and not really sure what happened.

I stood there for a minute, just watching where he ran and making sure he didn't return. I walked back to my apartment, still shaking and checking behind me every few steps, until I finally got home. I sat down against my door and cried, listening and hoping not to hear anyone on my noisy stairs. Eventually I fell asleep sitting there.

When I woke up I showered in my clothes, because everything he touched was dirty and I didn't even want to touch it to take it off. Later the police would scold me for this but I didn't care. I still don't.

It was exactly a week before my birthday and I spent my Valentine's Day in a police station reenacting the assault over and over for police, taking them to where I was attacked and answering question after question about every single movement that we all did. It was so jumbled in my mind it took a while for me to sort it out. The entire attack lasted no more than twenty seconds, and in those moments it was largely flailing arms and panic,

They took pictures, collected my clothes from my house, and asked me question after question in Japanese and English. It was a hard day and later on I ignored my phone when they called, which led them to call my boss, and my boss to call me the next day at work where I cried in the break room and told them what happened.

They had an idea of who attacked me, as girls had reported similar instances though none as violent as mine. None of them went through with it. None of them stuck it out to get him convicted. I can't blame them, I really can't. It was awful. I would go days ignoring my phone and my email until a police officer would show up at my door to take me to the station. After I correctly identified my attacker in a photo they arrested him and brought him in, where I looked through a tiny foot by foot one-way mirror in a door at the man who attacked me. He looked far less menacing that way, surrounded by police officers and behind a locked door.

A month and a half after my assault I moved to Hokkaido and thought myself done with it. I was wrong, they flew up twice. I'd drive for thirty minutes to the nearest city and sit in a cramped room being asked the same questions I'd been answering for months.

“Did he reach for your skirt before or after you choked him?”

“Before.”

“What arm did he reach down with?”

“His left.”

“What arm did you choke him with?”

“My right.”

These tiny details made me relive the moment over and over until I could see nothing else. The event itself probably lasted fifteen seconds but I wasn't allowed to forget it for months. At one point they asked me to tell them what I wanted done to this man, a question that shocked me and took a while for me to process. After I expressed my confusion they said, "You're emotional appeal for justice will help get him convicted." It felt wrong somehow, for me to decide what should happen to this man, as if I was resorting to his own level by forcing my will upon his fate.

I simply told them, "If he is mentally ill, I want him to get help. If he is of stable mind, I want him in jail. I don't want him to hurt anymore people. That's all I want. That's the only reason I am doing this."

They tried to convince me to take time off of work to testify in court, to fly across the country just to face this man and a judge and tell them what happened even though they had it written down a dozen different ways. I couldn't, I'd reached my limit.

“If you don’t go to court he'll go free.”

At this point I no longer cared, I wanted to move on. I lived on a different island now, I was safe. Though the thought of him doing it to someone else disgusted me and I hated myself for not being able to face it. The entire reason I had been doing this for months was so he couldn't hurt anyone.

Then, one day mid-August, I got an email. He was going to jail for two years, I didn't need to come to Yamaguchi. It was over. He'd finally confessed.

I cried again, for the last time, and was relieved in a way that made me realize I never really knew what relief was. I'd done it. I'd gotten him. He wasn't going to hurt anyone else for a while, hopefully ever, because for six months I dealt with it. I'm not the best with follow-through.

I share this story not to scare anyone. I don't want people to fear walking home at night in Japan. For the most part I don't. I have my problems still, whenever someone runs in my direction I freeze, that involuntary flinch that's hiding under my skin always. Middle-aged Japanese men make me uncomfortable when they look at me. I'm always thinking the worst with them and I feel guilty for making the blanket judgment.

But, I'm safe. He didn't even touch my skin. I had no marks from him, not even from where he grasped my arms so tightly, because I was wearing a jacket. I got off unscathed, unharmed physically. It could have been so much worse and I am so thankful every day I didn't drink more that night.

My story isn't a one-time fluke. It happens more than people realize in Japan, and I have shared my story with many friends only for them to tell me their own in return. They vary from stalking to stitches, but they're there. By sharing mine I don't feel brave or that I deserve some sort of praise for being so strong. Because lately I've not been. These things happen and I shouldn't have to feel shamed by sharing it, so I don’t. But I still feel like I need to share it, I need to broaden the audience who know my story outside of the friends I have shared it with. All too often I hear people brushing off Japan as "safe", almost blinding themselves with this notion that nothing bad can happen here, it's such a nice country. Every time I hear someone mention how safe Japan is compared to America or England or any other country I roll my eyes, I've been attacked here, I haven't been attacked in America. I'm biased.

Japan is still a country full of people, and people can sometimes do bad things. While it does have a low crime rate, it also has a mandatory shutter noise on all smartphones in the country due to perverts taking pictures up the skirts of girls and women. 

Struggles of Being Foreign in Japan

Disclaimer: I am writing this to shed light on my life as a foreigner in Japan and focusing on negative aspects of it. Overall, living in Japan has far more pluses than minuses, so please don't think I am "bashing" the country in any regard. I love Japan and its people! Please read with an open mind, and I would love to hear about your experiences or opinions on the matter or any similar matter.

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I've started this post a number of times and always find myself unhappy with it. Sometimes it feels too factual, other times I sound defensive, and sometimes it feels like I’m being too defensive. It’s a topic that is very pertinent to my daily life and the lives of many of my friends. I've talked about it at length with a number of different people from different backgrounds and I still  think the extent to which I completely understand how I feel about it is lacking. Simply put, I’m a foreigner in Japan. I have spent three years living in a country that I sometimes feel doesn't even want me around or doesn't take me seriously.

When I first heard about Blog Action Day I sat in my apartment wondering what exactly I could give to the topic. During my life I've never really felt discriminated against for my race or gender or the things I have liked. I grew up in white middle-class America, I have no college debt, and I never really had to work until I wanted to. While I am a woman, which presents its own issues with inequality, I've never been personally affected by those problems. Even still, I feel as if my struggles with inequality are minimal compared with those that have struggled historically.

In the three years I have lived in Japan I've lived in towns of various sizes. I started in a small city of 150,000 people in rural Yamaguchi prefecture. Seven months later, I moved to Hokkaido to live in a small village of 5,000 people where there were only two foreign girls in the entire place, myself included. Currently, I live in Sapporo. It is Japan's fourth largest city and home to nearly two million people. In 1972 it hosted the Winter Olympics and in 2002 it hosted a few games of the World Cup. Every winter season the area is flooded by foreigners who are here to visit the various ski resorts as annually the city gets roughly 20 feet of snow (600 cm). Seeing someone who isn't Japanese should be fairly common, at least by Japan standards.

Of course, it is a country where over 98% of the population is ethnically Japanese, so you aren't likely to see someone who doesn't look Asian on a daily basis. Many Japanese people don’t even see a foreigner until their first English lesson with an ALT (assistant language teacher) who will be a native speaker of the language from a different country. Coming from America it is still strange to see so many people who are of the same ethnicity walking around. I grew up in Orlando, Florida, so it’s easy to say that I am very used to seeing people of different nationalities on a regular basis. The homogeneous nature of Japan is very foreign to me.

Japanese people may be some of the kindest and most polite people in the world. On the subway I don’t even think I've seen someone talk on their phone outside of a few brief seconds to say they can’t talk. I can’t even remember the last time I heard someone’s phone go off in public. Crying children are promptly taken out of public spaces and in general the children keep to themselves. When you go shopping the clerks make you feel like royalty, bowing and walking you to the exit as if that $10 purse you bought was actually made by Jesus. The decrease in customer service is something I always have to adjust to when I go back to America.

I am not Asian.

Perhaps this cultural stress on being polite and minding yourself around strangers is what makes the Japanese mindset towards foreigners that much more insulting and frustrating. When I go out in public I am always being watched. If I want to pop out quickly to buy some milk at the convenience store down the block there will be at least one person who stares at me the entire time. If I am sitting in a café reading, there will be people looking at me every time I glance up. It’s something Japanese, and even foreigners who look Asian, don’t experience. Oftentimes I’ll walk with an Asian-looking person and they’ll say things such as, “this never happens to when I walk alone.”

Other times people try to get as far away from me as possible. The number of times the last seat on the subway is next to me is every time. It is also common for a group of Japanese people argue among themselves as to who will be the one to sit next to the foreigner, laughing and trying to get the shyest member to sit next to me. It’s as if just sitting beside someone who isn't Japanese is a huge deal, like I’ll suddenly start talking to them.

When I lived in Yamaguchi prefecture I went to visit the festival in the city neighboring mine. I don’t even think I had been in Japan for four full months at the time. It was crowded, with people cluttered in the streets watching the shrine procession go past. I was alone, snapping pictures on my camera and trying to absorb some Japanese culture when I heard snickering behind me. I turn to look, thinking maybe something funny was happening, but there was nothing. A group of maybe five high school boys were standing there, huddled together, looking at me. When they caught my eye one of the boys grinned and shoved his friend, who stumbled out before me and quickly went, “Hello! How are you?” then ran off with his friends. I stood there silently, frustrated. It felt to me like I was some sort of sideshow freak out in town, when in reality I was just a girl with curly brown hair, pale skin, and blue eyes standing on a sidewalk.

Since then I have these encounters on a weekly basis. Just this past weekend I was walking down a street with some friends and a group of (drunk) Japanese guys did the standard “Hello!” only to giggle and not even care if we responded to them. The worst of these is when the group starts speaking in Japanese assuming you can’t understand and you hear things like, “wow she’s so big,” or “her nose is very tall!” Even the blatantly positive comments about me being “beautiful” and having “water blue eyes” are often unwelcome. While these things are never done out of malice, the knowledge that I am constantly being watched, constantly being examined, constantly being judged is tiresome. I can’t even go grocery shopping without feeling as if everyone is looking in my basket to see what I am buying, since most times they are.

There are other situations in which being a foreigner is a huge disadvantage. When I was looking for an apartment I could only go to a small selection as the others wouldn't want to rent to me. When I got my cell phone I had to buy it outright because they don’t trust foreigners to do the monthly payments ($500 dollars vs. a $20 monthly payment). There are also the times when I have walked into a smaller café or bar and had the owner look at me as if I was the biggest piece of scum they have ever seen and all the want is for me to leave.

It is scary, too, at times. I am a woman and oftentimes I am on my own. The number of instances I have had of an older Japanese man getting right in my face and just looking at me silently without saying anything is too many. While Japan is a relatively “safe” country, things still happen (and have) so this gross invasion of my personal space when I am just waiting for a friend in a public space is extremely off-putting.

What perhaps makes me the saddest are the Japanese people who use foreigners for their own personal benefit. It’s not uncommon for me to be invited to parties to just be a foreign face. Oftentimes I’ll say I’m going to an event with some foreign friends and it will suddenly be advertised as an international party where Japanese people can come and speak English. It’s as if these people don’t care about getting to know me as a person, they just care what having me on their Facebook friends list means to others.

I understand that I am a visitor in this country, that my purpose here is to broaden the Japanese global perspective and allow Japanese children to get used to the idea of a “foreigner”. I am, however, still a person. I’m not some amusement attraction allowed to be on their own and I am not some monkey in a zoo. I am also not a status symbol that you can use to make yourself feel cultured and more globally aware. I am a person with feelings and boundaries. I’m not that different from a Japanese person. I get hungry, I get cranky, I have days where I just want to relax and not put on a “good” face, and I care about what people are saying about me even if I don’t know them.

I am sure these experiences are not limited to just Japan, and may be things expats experience in general regardless of the country and regardless of how much they stand out as being foreign. In this day in age, however, I think it’s important to keep in mind that we are all humans on this planet and that we all have similar wants and needs. Just because we may look different from each other, may speak a different language, and may have had a completely different upbringing doesn't mean we’re a different species, just a different race.

I wrote this post for the 2014 Blog Action Day please click here to learn more about the event and read other great posts about the topic of "inequality".