Unsolicited touching on a train involves cars, disarmingly innocent desire.

Most of the victims of chikan, as the people who grope train passengers in Japan are called, are women. However, on occasion men also find themselves the victims of unwanted yet willful touching by strangers on the train, which brings us to the story of Japanese Twitter user @happy_harada.

@happy_harada was recently on a an extremely crowded train, and while a certain amount of physical contact with your fellow passengers is unavoidable when you’re packed in like sardines, what he was experiencing went beyond what’s normal for such situations. Someone was purposely touching and rubbing his thigh, and he wasn’t going to stand for it.

▼ We’ll explain the photo of the highway in a moment.

In the above tweet, @happy_harada relays the story, starting with:

“On a crowded train, I could feel someone using some sort of item to touch the lower half of my body. ‘Damn you,’ I thought to myself, ‘My beautiful body may be smooth and slick, like a white dolphin, but don’t you dare think you’ll get away with making it your plaything!’”

@happy_harada’s supreme confidence in his physical attractiveness (though body hair removal is in fashion in Japan these days) and animal analogies aside, this definitely sounds like a disgusting, distressing situation to be in. He twisted his upper body around, ready to confront the groper, but discovered that the chikan label didn’t necessarily apply to the perpetrator in this case.

“I turned around, and there was a little foreign boy, playing with a small toy car. Out of his mom’s sight, he was pretending to drive the car up and down my leg…so I closed my eyes and became the highway.”

The act of unspoken kindness elicited comments including:

“You’re a Japanese gentleman.”
“A poet.”
“My dad recently passed away and I’ve been feeling really down, but I couldn’t help laughing out loud at this. Thank you.”

It’s rare for a chikan-related story to have a happy ending without some sort of violence being involved, but if a man can become a highway, we guess anything is possible.

Source: Jin
Top image: Pakutaso