A needlessly violent reaction to an everyday problem.
So here are two things that won’t surprise anyone who’s spent much time riding trains in Japan. First, trains can get very crowded, so even if you manage to snag a seat, odds are the spot next to you is also going to be occupied. Second, a lot of people take naps on the train, since the rail systems are punctual enough to predict your arrival time at your destination down to the minute, and the virtual lack of theft means people don’t worry about someone swiping their bag or wallet while they catch some Zs while riding the rails.
Putting these two things together, it should be obvious that oftentimes if you’re sitting down the person sitting next to you may be asleep, and the rocking motion of the car might cause the sleeping person to tip over and lean against you as they slumber. Suddenly being cast in the role of a stranger’s pillow isn’t most people’s idea of a fun commute, but since it’s inadvertent, most people tend not to get too bent out of shape about it (especially since there are a variety of ways to deal with the problem). The man shown in this video from Twitter user @SakuradaPC, however, is not most people, and we have to say we’re happy that he’s not representative of humanity society as a whole.
In the video, we see a woman slumping in the train’s bench seat, sleeping deeply as she clutches her bags in front of herself. So deep is her slumber that she’s now leaning against the right shoulder of the man in glasses, a face mask, and a business suit who’s sitting next to her.
After a few moments, the man calmly unzips his bag and pulls out his smartphone. However, he’s not pulling out the device to kill time by surfing the Internet, or to send out a tweet along the lines of “Dude, this woman on the train is totally sleeping against my shoulder. #commuting_sucks.” As a matter of fact, he doesn’t make use of the technology at all, because he just wants a blunt instrument to forcefully strike the woman in the head with.
And when we say “strike,” we mean it. It’s no mere tap designed to startle her awake, but a momentum-carrying swing that produces a thwack that’s audible above even the rattling of the train as it runs over the rails. In a further display of his gallant manliness, he quickly hides the phone back inside his bag, as the woman straightens herself up, and, if her body language is anything to go by, tries to make sense of what just happened.
“I get that you don’t want her leaning against you…” tweeted @SakuradaPC, “but that’s really messed up.” Other Twitter users left comments such as:
“There’s no way the guy would have done that if it had been some tough-looking dude sitting next to him. He hit her because she’s a woman [and he figured she] wouldn’t hit him back.”
“Some people are saying he didn’t want to use his hand to push her off because he didn’t want to be accused of being a chikan [train groper], but that can’t be the reason, can it?”
“Even if he was trying to avoid being called a chikan, that’s assault, which is a crime itself.”
“You could submit this video to the police as evidence.”
A surprising number of commenters criticized @SakuradaPC for filming people on the train, thinking that he’d been surreptitiously recording a video and just so happened to capture the moment of violence. However, that’s not how the vide came about. Before @SakuradaPC started recording, the man had already hit the woman in the head on three other occasions, at which point @SakuradaPC decided to pull out his own phone and record his fourth attack.
It’s unclear whether or not @SakuradaPC has, or plans to, submit the video to the police. As such we don’t know if the man will ever face the justice of the legal system, but here’s hoping that, at the very least, he broke his phone by using it in such a hateful, idiotic way.
Source: Twitter/@SakuradaPC via Jin