Japan's rush-hour gropers see red

Female commuters in urban Japan, where rush-hour trains are often packed to twice the official capacity, run the gauntlet of shameless male gropers, maulers and flashers every day.

Travelling to work in Tokyo on a packed train one morning, Mayumi Anraku looked up to find a male passenger waving his penis in front of her face. "It was just inches from me," she said. "It almost made me sick to look at it."

Most women bear these ordeals in silence and get off at the next stop, but others are saying enough is enough. Michiko Ogura frogmarched her tormentor to the station-master's office after he groped her on Tokyo's Chuo line last year. "He kept saying that I'd made a mistake, but they always claim that," she said.

Complaints have risen steadily since the police began compiling statistics in 1995, when 500 offenders were arrested. The figure has since risen to more than 1,000 a year, but most agree this is a fraction of the real total: most men, and not a few women, show no awareness that this type of molestation is a crime.

All the same, after regularly receiving about 100 complaints a week, the company which runs the Keio line in western Tokyo decided to run women-only carriages after 11pm. The Nagoya municipal government did the same on one of its more crowded lines in September. These initiatives have proved popular, at least with women. Nagoya has had just one report of sexual harass-ment since the scheme began and Keio also says complaints have fallen "significantly".

Michiko Ogura believes the segregated carriages hardly tackle the problem. "The trains only run at nights, and any woman will tell you that most groping happens in the morning rush hour. The problem is male attitudes, and how are you going to change those? But at least the trains are a start."

Even these modest measures, however, have brought a backlash from disgruntled males. Hundreds of men have protested to the Nagoya municipality about what they call its "counter-discriminatory" policies. Drunken salarymen on the Keio line have shown their displeasure more directly, shouting obscene abuse at the sight of the pink "females only" stickers on the side of trains.

Lurid tales of men falsely accused by vengeful females have become regular TV fodder. The media seized upon the case of a gang of teenage girls who extorted money by shouting "Chikan!" (pervert) at innocent men on crowded trains, before the racket was broken up by the police.

The fuss appears to have discouraged the train operators from expanding the initiative. The Nagoya scheme is up for review soon and there are "no plans" to expand the Keio experiment.