In Japan, #ActiveBystander campaign against sexual harassment hits men in the conscience

YouTube videos by sex educator aimed at people on the sidelines of harassment events provoke outpouring of reactions

‘I cried when I watched this video’, one woman said. ‘When will society change so women do not need to defend ourselves?’

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The underground system in Osaka, where, like throughout Japan, some cars are reserved for women to prevent sexual harassment. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 7:00am, 13 Dec 2020Updated: 10:47pm, 13 Dec 2020

A new video is empowering people in Japan’s famously reticent society to speak up when they witness incidents of sexual harassment, with reactions to the two-minute clip indicating that it is having the desired effect of making people act instead of choosing to look the other way.

The video is part of the #ActiveBystander campaign and was created by Shiori Onuki, a midwife and sex educator who has her own YouTube channel and makes videos under the name Shirolinu, and a woman author who has adopted the pen name Artesia.

First released on October 11, to coincide with the United Nations International Day of the Girl Child, the video was viewed on Twitter alone more than 2 million times in five days. It has also attracted tens of thousands of views on YouTube.

The hard-hitting clip shows six examples of the sort of sexual harassment that women in Japan have to put up with on a regular basis.

The first shows a man using a mobile phone to take a video clip of a woman standing in front of him on an escalator. The next clip is of a man deliberately bumping into a woman on a street as they pass, a groping tactic so frequent in Japan that it has its own term, “butsukaraiya”.

In the third storyline, a woman is groped by a man passing on a bicycle, while the next depicts a young man attempting to pick up a woman on the street, ignoring her repeated requests that he stop. In another clip, a woman’s drink is spiked with a drug in a bar, while the final storyline is a drunken after-work gathering in which a male employee bullies a female colleague and asks her inappropriate questions.

In each of the clips, a young man witnesses the harassment – but then looks away because he does not want to get involved. But in the alternative storylines, he is shown acting in a way that helps the victim.