BBC has published an investigation into some pornographic sites that sell videos of harassment committed against women who are traveling on public transport. This is a very popular genre both in Japan and in other Asian countries, and the BBC investigation explains some of the mechanisms behind these videos and their diffusion. Obviously the videos are illegal, and are considered a serious social problem in Japan and beyond.
The three sites at the center of the investigation are called DingBuZhu, Chihan and Jieshe: all three belong to a Chinese man who calls himself Uncle Qi on the sites and whose nickname for those who work there and know him is Maomi, “kitten” in Chinese. The man’s real name is Tang Zhuoran: in addition to owning the three sites, the man is also the perpetrator of many of the harassments portrayed within them. And according to what was reconstructed by the BBC, chikan, the name of this kind of pornographic video, is very popular in the video industry. The owner of these sites earns tens of thousands of euros a month from videos, according to the BBC.
Chikan pornographic videos are usually filmed in crowded public places, especially on subways and buses in several Asian countries: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. In most of these videos, shot very often during rush hour, a man surreptitiously films a woman from behind, follows her to somewhere where people are all crowded, and then gropes or abuses her by taking advantage of the crowd , filming the act.
According to Saito Akiyoshi, a psychologist and author of a book on the so-called chikan, molesters of this type, only in 10 percent of cases do women report the incident. Much more often, probably out of shame, due to the fact that sex is still very often experienced as a taboo and because in Japan yelling or insulting someone is seen as a particularly brutal act, the woman endures until she has to get off.
Chikan is a long-discussed issue in Japan, causing thousands of people to be arrested every year, and which has recently begun to receive attention abroad as well. In Canada and the United Kingdom, for example, tourists who go on a trip to Japan are advised to pay attention to this type of harassment, against which a campaign has been launched locally in which, among other things, pins with the words “stop chikan” are distributed : the campaign was launched by Takako, a woman interviewed by the BBC who had suffered numerous harassments of this type during her adolescence.
In one neighborhood of Yokohama, also in Japan, there is even a sex club called “Rush Hour” in which the environment of a crowded subway has been recreated, with private rooms decorated like subway cars, membership cards they look like public transport passes and sound systems that recreate the noises of the subway. According to those who run it, the place allows men to vent their fantasies without harming other people.
According to the BBC, chikan videos are now extremely widespread and among the most popular in the Japanese porn industry.
The case that followed the BBC started precisely from the visibility that the user Uncle Qi had on many Chikan pornographic sites. His account was linked to a PayPal account that received Japanese yen, and by looking at the various videos, the authors of the investigation identified the Tokyo subway station from which the user seemed to film most of his videos: that of Ikebukuro, in the center of Tokyo.
By entering the email address in Google Contacts, Gmail’s contact management tool, the authors of the survey selected his profile picture – a young man with a particular hairstyle and very marked make-up – and uploaded it to Google Images, which referred them to Noctis Zang, a 30-year-old singer of Chinese descent living in Tokyo who is a member of a music group called The Versus.
By doing a little research, the authors of the investigation discovered that some time ago on the Chinese social network Weibo a member of the same band had accused the singer of collaborating on a series of pornographic sites together with another person, Lupus Fu: he had also shared a video that showed Noctis’ history, in which some of the chikan sites in question appeared.
At that point, posing as a musical talent scout called Ian, an undercover BBC journalist had tracked down Noctis, met him in a Tokyo club and started dating him (the BBC investigation lasted a year). After some time Ian had told Noctis that his company was also interested in investing in pornographic sites, Noctis had introduced him to Lupus Fu and the two had also told him about another person, Maomi. When the reporter mentioned the DingBuZhu website in a fake casual way, the two told him that it belonged to him.
The journalist had thus discovered that in addition to owning the sites, Maomi had a group of collaborators with whom he managed them and who promoted the videos on various social networks, including Twitter: in total he managed a group of 15 people, including 10 in China who they made videos with his own name. From China he received from 30 to 100 videos a month. The authors of the investigation said that Maomi, described as a maniacally reserved person by his associates, refused for some time to meet the undercover journalist, only to later agree to meet him in a Tokyo karaoke club.
It was during this interview, in which Ian pretended to be interested in how profitable his business was, that Maomi had said, showing the transactions on his mobile phone, that he earned the equivalent of 800-1600 euros a day from the videos he uploaded online, bought especially from Chinese users for a total of about 10,000 subscribers to his channel. Ian had sued Uncle Qi by then and Maomi had admitted it was him.
BBC reporters managed to find out his real identity, Tang Zhuoran, during a subsequent meeting where they saw the name on his credit card. Today it seems that Zhuoran has left Japan, and that Noctis and Lupus no longer work for him.
– Read also: The law to restrict the circulation of sexual images, in Japan
