Days after their rape, Megumi Okano says, they already knew the attacker would get away scot-free.
Megumi, who uses they as a personal pronoun, knew the man who did it, and where to find him. But Megumi also knew there would be no case, because Japanese authorities were not likely to consider what happened as rape.
So the university student decided not to report the incident to the police.
“As I couldn’t pursue [justice] that way, he got to live a free and easy life. It is painful to me,” Megumi says.
But change may be coming. The Japanese parliament is now debating a landmark bill to reform the country’s sexual assault laws, only the second such revision in a century.
The bill covers a number of changes, but the biggest and most significant one will see lawmakers redefine rape from “forcible sexual intercourse” to “non-consensual sexual intercourse” – effectively making legal room for consent in a society where the concept is still poorly understood.
Current Japanese law defines rape as sexual intercourse or indecent acts committed “forcibly” and “through assault or intimidation”, or by taking advantage of a person’s “unconscious state or inability to resist”.
This is at odds with many other countries which define it more broadly as any non-consensual intercourse or sexual act – where no means no.
Activists argue that Japan’s narrow definition has led to even narrower interpretations of the law by prosecutors and judges, setting an impossibly high bar for justice and fostering a culture of scepticism that deters survivors from reporting their attacks.
In a 2014 Tokyo case, for instance, a man had pinned a 15-year-old girl to a wall and had sex with her while she resisted. He was acquitted of rape as the court ruled his actions did not make it “extremely difficult” for her to resist. The teenager was treated as an adult because the age of consent in Japan is only 13 years – the lowest among the world’s richest democracies.
“The actual trial processes and decisions vary – some defendants were not convicted even if their acts were proven to be non-consensual, as they did not meet the case of ‘assault or intimidation’,” says Yuu Tadokoro, a spokesman for Spring, a sexual assault survivor group.
It’s why Megumi says they did not go to the police after the assault by a fellow university student.
According to Megumi, the two of them were watching TV together when he began making sexual advances towards Megumi, who said “No”.
Then, he attacked. The two “wrestled” for a while, says Megumi, before Megumi froze and gave up resisting. This well-documented response to an attack is sometimes not covered by the current law, according to activists.