Women-Only Cars Introduced in Tokyo

Would women-only train cars survive an American lawsuit? asks Joe over at NichiNichi. I think it’s borderline discrimination, as noted in this post. Joe seems to agree, but notes that some Japanese men support it despite the crowding:

‘It’s a good change because I no longer have to carry a bag and hang onto a strap to avoid being mistaken for a molester,’ Hitoshi Ishida, 53, a company employee from the Saitama Prefecture city of Kawaguchi, said. ‘But if other carriages are more crowded as a result, the railway operator should set some other coaches aside for elderly people.

Continues Joe:

Now, I’m far from a brilliant legal scholar, but this seems as if it would be sketchy under U.S. constitutional law. When the government is endorsing gender discrimination, it needs some sort of exceedingly persuasive justification to do so. And a regime like this seems to be discriminatory. The ladies can sit in a relatively uncrowded car on the train, while the gentlemen are forced to stand in the cattle cars. (Admittedly, JR is private, but it’s subsidized; and Tokyo Metro, which is run by the government, wants to introduce a similar scheme next month.)

Both Joe and I will be commuting during rush hour in Tokyo in just a few short weeks, so we’ll keep you posted on what it’s really like.