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

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.

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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.

On the escalator, he stands close to the man with the camera to let him know that he has been seen. He steps in to pretend to be a friend of the woman who is being accosted on the street. He helps the woman who has been knocked over back to her feet and offers to report the incident to the police. In the final clip, he speaks up to tell his superior that his comments and actions are inappropriate.

The message across the screen reads, "Turning away creates a society in which it is easy for sexual violence to occur." At the very end, the actor turns to the viewer and asks, "What would you have done if you were me?"

In her blog, Artesia said, "I have long been wondering how I can help to get rid of the problem of sexual violence, and I reached the conclusion that we need to appeal to the people who are on the sidelines of these events, not the perpetrators or the victims.

"As soon as the video was released, it spread at an explosive speed," she wrote. "There were many comments on the net and I was interviewed by many different media."

Most important, she said, were the responses to the video from ordinary women.

"Women wrote that they empathised with the sexual violence that they were seeing in the video, one saying 'I cried because it was so real'," she said. "On the other hand, some men were surprised and said they had not known that these sorts of things happened."

It is that viewership that the creators of the video want to reach as they are the ones who can intervene in a sexual harassment situation.

"I wanted men to understand that women are being harmed on a daily basis, which is why I made the main bystander a male character," Artesia added.

The clips have provoked an outpouring of reactions, including some from women who have experienced these sorts of situations.

"I have had this kind of experience several times, but no one has ever come to help me," wrote one poster on Twitter. "I want more people to see this video."

In another message, a woman wrote, "I cried when I watched this video. Things like this have happened to me several times. Even when I was not wearing a short skirt or revealing clothing. When will society change so women do not need to defend ourselves?"

A male poster added: "I once came across a similar situation, but I could not react and, in the end, I did nothing. After watching this video, I have a better idea of how I can intervene to help. Thank you for making this video."

Noriko Hama, a professor of economics at Kyoto's Doshisha University and an advocate of women's rights, welcomed the initiative, but said she had some concerns.

"I feel there is too much diffidence on the part of the vast majority of Japanese people when they are put in situations such as these," she told This Week in Asia. "If it is not something that directly concerns them, they are reluctant to butt in where they are not wanted or they fear that they are misunderstanding a situation.

"It's the same reluctance we see among most Japanese people to speak out or ask a question," she said. "Often, these people are looking for social cues in any given situation and when they are absent, they do nothing out of fear of making a mistake and losing face," she said.

"I think this is a great initiative and certainly long overdue, but I also feel that too many young people in Japan are still in the diffident category and will not, when the situation crops up, rise to the occasion."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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