The “Indian Man” Who Hit on Women on a Train—Was He Really Indian?

The other day, a woman I know told me a strange story.

She was riding a train when a foreign man who looked Indian and spoke broken Japanese suddenly approached her.

When she ignored him, he immediately moved on to the woman beside her and started talking to her instead.

It was quite the carpet-bombing approach.

She is mentally tough enough to laugh about it, but for some people, it would be genuinely frightening. Unlike a bar or an entertainment district, a train is not a place you can easily leave. If he had persisted, it would have been perfectly reasonable to ask station staff or the police for help.

When I was younger, I occasionally approached women at tourist spots myself. But it never occurred to me to approach one stranger after another inside a train.

In Japan, that kind of behavior looks highly unusual.

My Wife Had a Similar Experience

My wife once had a similar experience.

She, too, was suddenly approached on the street by a foreign man who looked Indian.

My wife may get angry with me for saying this, but she is no longer what most people would call a young woman.

If these men are not targeting only young women but approaching almost anyone, it makes me wonder whether this is really about picking someone up. Are they looking for a marriage partner, or do they have some other objective, such as securing residency status? I do not know, so that is only speculation.

In any case, this kind of behavior stands out sharply in Japanese public spaces.

And that is when I noticed a problem.

Was He Even Indian in the First Place?

So far, I have referred to him as “Indian.”

But no one checked his passport.

He may have been Indian, but he could also have been Pakistani, Bangladeshi, or Nepali. To be honest, I cannot identify South Asian nationalities by appearance alone.

And yet, the human mind is remarkably convenient: the moment we see someone’s appearance, we classify them as “Indian.”

Then, after seeing one person behave badly, it is easy to expand that into a claim such as:

“Indians have bad manners.”

But the original assumption that the person was Indian may itself have been wrong.

The Same Thing Happens to Japanese People

This is not someone else’s problem as far as Japanese people are concerned.

When the behavior of Chinese tourists becomes an issue overseas, Japanese people are sometimes mistaken for Chinese as well.

From a Japanese perspective, we want to say:

“No, Chinese and Japanese people are different.”

But when I see someone from South Asia and casually identify them as Indian, I am doing much the same thing.

From the outside, some people cannot distinguish Japanese, Chinese, and Korean people by appearance alone.

Some Chinese tourists commit conspicuous breaches of etiquette. Someone sees this and concludes that “East Asians have bad manners.” Then Japanese people who have done nothing wrong are thrown into the same box.

It is unfair, but we make similar classifications ourselves.

Reason and Instinct Do Not Align So Easily

Having written this much, it would be easy to produce a neat conclusion.

“Therefore, we should not judge people by their appearance and should treat everyone equally.”

Ending there would make this a perfectly exemplary essay.

But I am not that broad-minded.

I do not know whether the man in this story was actually Indian. Even so, it is also true that I have a somewhat negative image of Indians as untrustworthy. When I hear a story like this one, that image inevitably crosses my mind.

Of course, I understand the logic. It makes no sense to judge more than a billion people by the actions of one person. In this case, we did not even confirm that he was Indian.

Even so, human wariness does not disappear through logic alone.

Reason and instinct do not align so easily.

That is why I am also quite pessimistic about the challenge of building a society where Japanese people and foreigners live alongside one another.

Japan is not a nation of immigrants like the United States. Seeing Europe’s failures only makes me more pessimistic.

For that reason, when it comes to accepting foreign workers, I oppose the current policy of bringing in large numbers of people for low-skilled work. If a country seeks large amounts of cheap labor, some of those workers will inevitably be people who do not share Japanese rules or norms of behavior in public spaces.

In practical terms, people with higher levels of education tend to have better manners.

The unfortunate reality is that Japan is gradually losing the economic strength and appeal needed to select and attract, from around the world, foreign workers who are ethical, capable, and willing to respect Japanese rules.

Highly capable people have options other than Japan. Some countries offer higher wages, while others are growing more rapidly.

Japan can present a list of demands:

“We have a labor shortage, so we want foreigners to come. But we also want them to cause no problems, understand Japanese customs, and work diligently even for low wages.”

Yet the better a person satisfies those conditions, the less likely they may be to choose Japan.

Japan assumed it would be the one selecting foreigners. Before we knew it, Japan had become the one being selected.

That concerns me far more than the nationality of the man who approached women on the train.