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The Chikan

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Beware of Chikan.
Dawn: Why didn't you wait until we were in the tunnel?
Peter: I thought I was. Sorry.

Japanese public transit is very crowded — in fact, the operating companies hire employees to help pack trains as full as possible at the height of rush hour (often struggling young or retired sumo wrestlers who need extra cash). Japanese society also has strict sexual mores that tend to stigmatize women who report sexual harassment. Therefore, a significant social problem is that of creepy strangers on public transit (or in parks) surreptitiously groping women, avoiding punishment either by hiding in the crowd and confusion, or by counting on a woman's sense of shame to prevent her from reporting the crime. These men are known by some anime fans as chikan (chikan is actually the act of sexual assault by groping, not the perpetrator), and signs are prominently posted in parks and on transit warning women about them. The females who engage in this behavior are called chijo.

As of 2006, the Japanese subways have addressed this problem by establishing women-only cars on every train. These are reportedly quite popular.note  However, their failure to completely solve the problem resulted in the introduction of routine undercover police patrols of subways in 2009, coupled with new awareness campaigns to encourage reporting and prosecution of offenders.

This problem, incidentally, is also common in other crowded countries with traditionally very patriarchal cultures. Countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America have, inspired by Japan, started designating certain passenger cars in their public transport networks (subways, commuter railways, bus lines, etc.) as women-only for basically the same reason.

Many anime and manga series have at least one episode where a female character encounters a chikan who must be confronted or evaded. The Chikan will tend to be a one-shot character serving a similar role to the Monster of the Week. It's rare for a series to have a recurring chikan, although quite a few series have perverted characters, many of whom are even portrayed sympathetically. Chikan can also be considered a specific genre of pornography, particularly in Japan where the plot of doujins, hentai, films, etc. can be centered around the issue.

Due to differing social values, this trope is relatively unknown in the West, where a woman in this position is much more likely to scream bloody murder and possibly take a swing at the creep.


Examples:

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    Advertising 
  • One of the Charlie girls in this Charlie perfume commercial is a chijo.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Takako Shimura seems to have a thing for Chikan in her manga:
    • In her earliest multi-volume manga Inhabitants of the Threshold the protagonist - who is a boy - gets molested by a man on the bus.
    • In Sweet Blue Flowers, the characters meet again after Fumi is molested on the train. Akira stomps on the Chikan's foot after she recognizes Fumi's expression and advises she remember to do that in the future.
    • Wandering Son:
      • Briefly referenced to. Once beginning high school, Chiba began going on the train. She later says she encountered a pervert, but nothing much is said about it. Starting from then, she lets her mom drive her to school.
      • In an unrelated manga anthology, Yuki had a chapter about her. She gets groped by a man on the train, but they end up making small talk.
  • Boku to Boku starts when a tomboyish girl points out a chikan on the train who is touching a middle school girl. The two talk later and she quickly learns that the "girl" is a Wholesome Crossdresser.
  • Case Closed:
    • Masumi Sera was believed to be a chikan who molested Sonoko during her introduction, so Ran attacked her. Fortunately, Sera could defend herself. Conan pointed out that Sera grabbed the hand of the actual chikan and Sonoko mistook the wrong one for the culprit. Of course, they didn't know that Sera was a girl when they first met her.
    • A character called Etsutoshi Oba crossed his arms in the train, so nobody would mistake him as a chikan. It turns out that he crossed his arms to hide the knife which he used to kill the hooligan who killed his twin brother.
  • In Change 123 Motoko is molested by a chikan on the way to meet Kosukegawa. She is so flustered that her Split Personality Hibiki takes control and reaches down to meet the pervert's fingers. At first, he believes she is getting into it, but needless to say this was not the case.
    "Woah! All four of his fingers are backwards."
    "CALL AN AMBULANCE!!"
  • Cheeky Angel has both a chikan episode and a sekuhara (sexual harassment) episode.
  • In Death Note, Mikami sets one up to die so he can confuse the SPK with a fake notebook.
  • A short one in Deep Love where a man molests Ayu on a train, she lets him and robs him afterwards (charging the amount she would for regular johns). She throws the money away afterwards.
  • A whole episode of Detective School Q focuses on three detective girls (Megumi, Yukihira and Kuniko) trying to capture one of these who attacked Kuniko on a train. Kuniko had just gone through a tremendous Break the Cutie ordeal few weeks ago and, despite her Adrenaline Makeover, she still had a long way to go, and ended up having a sobbing meltdown. Yukihira also gave her a quick Get A Hold Of Yourself Man, letting her pull her act together, which she did as the three girls worked together to locate the offender and prove his involvement. By the end not only they succeed, but Kuniko partially upgrades to Action Girl by being the one who knocked out the chikan in the end.
  • Detroit Metal City:
    • In an early chapter, Negishi is falsely accused of subway groping.
    • It later also turns out that the temporary absence from the music scene of Gaylord (the first Lord Krauser) was because he was serving a prison sentence for sexual assault after groping women on trains.
  • Eden no Hana features one that tries to grope Midori Wakatsuki's thigh when she falls asleep on her train seat. Her classmate Hashiba realises this just in time and scares him off.
  • Futana from Futaba-kun Change!, much to the dismay of "her" brother.
  • Hilariously done when Agon and Hiruma save a girl from one of these in Eyeshield 21. After being sent a live video feed of said girl being harassed by a chikan, Agon immediately leaves where he is, goes to the subway, and rips the man from the train while it's moving. Agon then gets to work on getting under the girl's skirt while Hiruma goes on to blackmail the chikan.
  • In Girl Friends (2006), Sugi encounters one during her A Day in the Limelight chapter, who happens to be her elementary school teacher. This is also something of a subversion because she's actually used to dealing with molesters; it's the salarymen who come to her rescue that she worries about because they inevitably want to date her.
  • Great Teacher Onizuka: In a rare case of the chikan being a regular character, our hero pounds one on the bus in an early episode, only to find out later that the molester is his new boss, Vice-Principal Hiroshi Uchiyamada. Uchiyamada eventually ends up landing in serious hot water when he's caught by an undercover policewoman, leaving his things in the train when he flees in a panic. Naturally, Onizuka finds it, and fearing blackmail, Uchiyamada decides to not go forward in his latest "get Onizuka fired" plot. The irony of the first situation is that Onizuka himself wanted to do it, but Uchiyamada got there first. And, to top it off, the victim is also someone he would get to meet that day: Azusa (in fact, it was this incident that led to them meeting).
  • Kanojo Ni Naritai starts with the protagonist getting felt up by a man while riding to school and is too nervous to do anything. Luckily a girl — his crush, surprisingly — rescues him.
  • In one chapter of the Sgt. Frog manga, mom Aki ends up fending off a chikan with a judo throw while ruminating on what makes an appealing manga character. She then tells him "If you want to feel up this manga character, come up with a better scenario first!"
  • Kimagure Orange Road: In a manga episode, Kyosuke is distressed because Madoka is mad with him, and his cousin Kazuya advises him to act like a pervert towards Madoka to get her to forgive him. Too dumb to acknowledge an obvious plot to get back on him, Kyosuke falls for it and he decides to fondle Madoka in the subway… but before he makes the attempt, another woman gets fondled near them and angrily confronts her harasser. Madoka states how much she detests that kind of man, and Kyosuke wisely loses his nerve and realizes that apologizing to Madoka is the right action to earn her forgiveness.
  • Nanoka runs into a chikan on her way to school during an episode of Koi Kaze. It's not a major plot point, but it occurs shortly after Nanoka got into an argument with her older brother Koshiro because she felt he was being annoyingly overprotective of her, and the experience led her to appreciate that Koshiro meant well.
  • Love Hina:
    • In the Christmas Special, Motoko is groped by one on a subway; her response, being Motoko, is violence. But unlike the vast majority of violence, she was able to inflict in Love Hina to that point, this time, her beating the man almost gets her arrested.
    • Also happens by accident to Naru and Keitaro. Poor guy just never gets a break...
  • In the Midori Days manga, several girls in Ayase's class get their skirt slit by a pervert on the subway. Ayase's response is to dress Seiji in drag and have him accompany her on the train. Naturally, his (uninformed) male friends think him the hottest thing ever. He catches the pervert ripping Ayase's dress and proceeds to beat the crap out of him, only partially losing his disguise in the process. And accidentally ripping off Ayase's skirt.
  • An episode of Miss Machiko feauture a man harrass the young female student on a bus. Initially the Dirty Kid Kenta is mistaken for the culprit, but Machiko and Kenta set a trap for catching the real culprit.
  • My Love Story!! begins when Takeo sees a man trying to grope a girl on the train and confronts him. It's Love at First Sight for Takeo and the girl, his future girlfriend Yamato. The man tries to victim blame Yamato for wearing a short skirt (her school uniform) but Takeo punches him.
  • Inverted in Negima! Magister Negi Magi in the first chapter when Negi is riding to the school. Little boys are QUITE popular with high school age girls. And that sequence was significantly less perverted in the original than it was in the Del Rey version...
  • In No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, this was the focus of chapter 24 aptly titled, "Because I'm not popular, I'm going to get molested". In the chapter, Tomoko hears one of her classmates complain about how she was molested on her way to school and laments that no one wants to molest her. Eventually, she does get molested only to find out that her "molester" was in fact a large staff.
  • In Otome no Teikoku, Ayano encounters one on the train ride to school, and unlike most things in the manga that deal with sex, this is not played for titillation. While we don't see the attack, we do see the usually cool Ayano hesitant to leave school and when her best friend, Miyoshi demands to know what’s wrong, Ayano breaks down crying saying how scared she was.
  • In an early story in Parasyte, an alien possessing the body of a female schoolteacher catches a chikan groping a different woman, while commuting home. She loudly calls him out on it, and eventually beats him senseless. The other passengers, meanwhile, cheer her on.
  • In Penguindrum, Ringo's friend Yukina mistakes Shouma for one. Meanwhile, #1 is prone to squeeze into skirts and has mastered the Floor-Level Mirror Technique.
  • Parodied in an episode and chapter of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei. Nozomu is shown handcuffing himself to the train railing to prevent accusations of this, but when Nami screams out for an unrelated reason, he gets arrested anyway. When Nami explains he wasn't molesting her, the police are happy to let him go, but Nozomu wants to plead guilty — his logic is to the effect that being punished means he can move on afterward, but if he denies it, people will think he's scum.
  • This issue is only referenced, never explained in Seitokai Yakuindomo. In episode one, main character Takatoshi finds himself in a subway car nearly exclusively populated by women. To keep from being falsely accused, he assumes the same position as all the other men: riding with his hands held high so that no one can call him a molester. It's a social issue that's played for laughs, like most other things in the series.
  • Subverted in Shimoneta, where the girl falsely accuses a guy of groping her on the railway for the reward money she'd get for turning him in under the setting's Orwellian obscenity laws. The main character has to rescue the guy by claiming that he did it and then trying to run away.
  • In an episode of Speed Grapher, a guy grabs Kagura's ass on a subway, however, since Kagura is a sheltered rich girl who knows very little about the real world and has never even been on the subway before, she doesn't do anything about it and just giggles and blushes. A bit later when Saiga asks what she was giggling about, she tells him a guy was "tickling" her; Saiga tells her the guy was a pervert and she should have told him about it sooner.
  • In Strawberry 100% Mukai is harassed on a bus from one of this; Manaka intervenes interposing between them. Manaka himself is mistaken for a chikan by Amachi while he and Aya find themselves too close on a bus.
  • The Tokyo Ghoul one-shot Joker, Juuzou and his partner witness one molesting a girl on the train and call him out. Shortly afterwards, they come across the pervert being attacked by the Ghoul they've been hunting. It turns out to be the girl they rescued, who followed and ripped the offending arm off in revenge.
  • Ultra Maniac had Ayu get prodded by a boy when travelling to school one morning, Nina makes her a magical ring to stop perverts touching Ayu in future. It is supposed to give them non-lethal but still pretty painful electric shocks when they touch Ayu at all, unfortunately it classifies anyone male as a potential groper.
  • Video Girl Ai has an open-air example, early on: when Youta and Ai are going out, someone fondles Ai's butt in the middle of the crowd, and Ai turns to confront the culprit... Only to find she got the wrong guy, a big burly man. The man, in response, decides to beat Ai up in front of everyone to - in his words - salvage his reputation, only for Youta to take the punch for her. By the way, the author helpfully shows us the guy who actually groped Ai, but he ends up becoming a Karma Houdini due to the ensuing incident.
  • In You're Under Arrest!, the transgender woman Aoi Futaba is actually part of the Anti-Chikan unit. She began dressing as a woman specifically to catch these type of people.
  • One hentai subverted the usual expectation for its genre with regards to this trope. The woman in question (the heroine) pinched the offending hand with her hairclip and disembarked.

    Comic Books 
  • An issue of Power Girl featured a pervert who groped her in a subway. Bad idea.
  • Voltaire's comic, Deady Big in Japan mentions this when Deady is shoved into a subway. He turns out to be the Chikan. (Since he has tentacles, he is able to harass a great deal of women at once) The women he is harassing then accuse an elderly man of touching them and beat him up. Deady walks away unscathed.
  • Issue 51 of Gen¹³ has Fairchild riding a train with a crowd of men around that don't miss the chance to rub against her using the train's exit as excuse.

    Fanfics 

    Film — Live-Action 

    Literature 
  • Western example: The main character in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is groped on a train. Her aunt considers it a sign of maturity. This particular aunt is a Good Bad Girl who Really Gets Around, and the story is set in the 1910s, so expect some Values Dissonance to be in play. To be fair to the aunt, she gave her a knitting needle which the protagonist was almost looking forward to using.
  • In the introductory Japanese textbook Genki, one of the male characters, Takeshi, is groped by a shadowy chikan in a cartoon illustration of the vocabulary world "sawararemashita" (to be touched against one's will).
  • For Your Eyes Only: in the short story From a View To a Kill, a female Bond's colleague told him that she had to give up Parisian public transportation, because she was constantly groped there. She didn't like it, of course, but the final straw was that the gropers liked to pinch: "Whatever time of day it is, you end up with your behind black and blue."

    Live-Action TV 
  • The story of Densha Otoko (Train Man), both in real life and the dramatized TV version, starts with a loser confronting a chikan on the subway and unexpectedly winning a date for his trouble.
  • They try to set up a sting for this on Reno 911!, but since the "bait" is Dep. Weigel no one tries it.
  • The plot of a Season 1 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit was the hunt for a Serial Rapist who'd been attacking several women on the subway like this, moving quickly enough to assault them between stops and escape once the doors opened. To make matters worse, he attacked them from behind, leaving his victims unable to identify him.

    Video Games 
  • Lei-Fang's ending in Dead or Alive 4 is a perfect example of Values Dissonance. A man stumbles on a train and accidentally grabs Lei-Fang's breasts as he's falling. She responds by kicking him out of the train's windows, where he plummets into a river. The situation is Played for Laughs, and the crowd gets up and gives Lei-Fang a standing ovation. Find the video on YouTube and read the comments to get an idea of how disturbing this is to Westerners... Though some of the commenters do seem to think it was Disproportionate Retribution (it's explicitly shown to be an accident on the man's part) and the guy may have been killed. Some of the applause was probably due to her shirt unbuttoning and her skirt slitting up to her pantyline.
  • In Twinbee Taisen Puzzle-Dama, Madoka takes Dr. Warumon as one upon encountering him in her storyline. The poor guy's response to this is priceless.
  • Lost Judgment is kicked off by policeman Akihiro Ehara being arrested for groping a woman on the subway, which as it turns out was a carefully crafted alibi for a murder that involved multiple parties, including the supposed victim herself.

    Visual Novel 
  • This is the main premise of the Hentai visual novel Saishuu Chikan Densha. The protagonist is a man who molests some girls in the train.

    Web Animation 
  • Etra chan saw it!:
    • Tsutsuji became a victim of this when she was harassed by Akamatsu inside a crowded train, fortunately, Karin witnessed them and saved her from him.
    • Akamatsu thinks someone was touching him inside a crowded train, the molester turns out to be Hiiragi, who has a crush on him.
    • Subverted, Azami falsely accuses Hiiragi of molesting her while commuting inside a train to get settlement money from him. This causes Tokusa, Yuri and Akane to debunk her accusation as they saw him holding his smartphone in one hand and the strap in the other. After Azami leaves the train, Hiiragi also tells Tokusa that he would never touch a woman's butt because he is gay.
    • Happens to Akane offscreen. She mentioned she was late for work because she got molested on the train. Akamatsu blames it on her for wearing something inappropriate.
    • Yuzuriha tells Akane, Azami, and Tsutsuji about a plan to raise money by falsely accusing a random people of molesting them on a crowded train, and forces Tsutsuji to be the pretend victim.
    • Subverted, Akamatsu gets falsely accused by Akane of molesting her in a subway, this turns out to be a part of the revenge plan hatched by her, Hiiragi and Tachibana to make Akamatsu face the consequences for making them suffer back in middle school. Even after Akane took back her sexual assault report against Akamatsu, he is still arrested and imprisoned for possessing unknown contents in his phone and computer, which is also part of the revenge.

    Webcomics 

    Western Animation 
  • One of Roger's many personas in American Dad!.
    Roger: Something ate holes in all my sweaters! They're ruined! Some of my best costumes are sweater-based. How am I supposed to be Japanese subway molester Shinju Omigawa without his baby blue cardigan?!
  • Daria: An implied instance involving a recurring character acting as one occurs in "Malled". As the class is crowded together on a small shuttle train, Brittany is startled by someone touching her and lightly tells off her boyfriend Kevin... until the camera pans to reveal Upchuck standing nearby, grinning and raising an eyebrow.

Alternative Title(s): Chikan, Train Molester

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