Railways brace for onslaught of holiday-season drunks

For most people, the end of the year is a time for making merry. For the nation's railroad employees, who have to deal with those merrymakers, it is a nightmare.

Incidents involving drunk passengers usually peak in April and December. April, the start of the fiscal and academic years, is a season of parties for college and company freshmen, while December brings the traditional round of "bonenkai" yearend parties.

At stations operated by East Japan Railway Co. in and around Tokyo, more than one worker was beaten or kicked every two days by drunken passengers in fiscal 1999.

As well as the violence, it is common to see people sleeping or vomiting on station platforms -- or inside the trains.

Sleepers are sometimes the most dangerous, as they are prone to violent behavior on being suddenly woken. An in-house guideline tells JR East employees not to stand in front of them when waking them up and not to actually touch them.

"One of our colleagues sustained a broken hip that took 90 days to heal," said Toshio Shiraishi, a deputy manager in charge of passenger services with JR East's marketing department.

Attacks on JR East workers totaled about 330 in fiscal 1999. Roughly 60 percent of the assailants were drunken passengers, he said, and the assaults occurred "for no particular reason."

When JR East reported these cases of violence to a Sept. 27-29 forum on train operation security organized in Madrid by the Paris-based International Union of Railways, Shiraishi said a stir went through the audience that suggested the problem was peculiar to Japan.

Tsukasa Mizusawa, a senior counselor at ASK Human Care Inc., which works toward curbing alcohol abuse, suggests the problem is rooted in culture. Japanese people, he said, feel they cannot refuse alcohol offered by their company bosses or older friends in college clubs.

"Alcohol used to symbolize power," he said. "Sake is brewed from rice, and only those who had power could use this important food for other purposes in ancient agrarian societies.

"To be given sake meant the receiver was allowed into the Establishment, and few dreamed of refusing it. That's the main reason why many Japanese lack all sense of 'responsible drinking' and are too soft on drunken people."

Mizusawa believes that maintaining the order of the group is given priority over doing the right thing as an individual, "because only some 50 years have passed since we abandoned feudalism or militarism."

What further supports this attitude is that forgiveness is given freely. In Japan, he noted, it is common that businessmen are not reprimanded if they have been rude to their superiors after getting drunk at a party or even after groping female colleagues there.

In a recent high-profile case, Naoki Sugiyama, the catcher for the Japan Series champion Yomiuri Giants, was arrested by police in Miyazaki Prefecture on suspicion of molesting a woman at a bar and beating her with a shoe on Oct. 11.

After two weeks passed, Sugiyama was arrested on Oct. 25 and reportedly said "I was too drunk to remember anything." The police moved in only after the 31-year-old catcher had been exposed by the media.

Mizusawa said he and his colleagues at ASK Human Care, which publishes books and organizes seminars with the sponsorship of a citizens' group that claims nearly 2,000 members, have tried to discourage forced chug-a-lug drinking.

Since 1990, at least 59 people -- many of them male college students -- have died of alcohol poisoning or other causes related to alcohol abuse at parties, the group said.

"If a group of sober people caused a person's death, many of them would be criminally charged, as indeed many youths have been for practical jokes that had fatal consequences," Mizusawa said.

"But few people suspected of forcing these victims to down their alcohol like this have ever been charged."