Sharking . . . if you haven’t heard of it, is an extreme street sport that is gaining a larger following and attracting more DVDers out to mine the lucrative voyeur market . . . basically, the setup is two guys, one with the camera to capture the action, usually hidden under a coat or in a bag of some sort, and the other is the shark, the predator who stalks his prey on the streets of Tokyo (and recently sharking activities have spread to other cities and likely other countries soon). The pair will select a target, usually an attractive young woman, usually alone but sometimes in pairs. Once the video has captured the woman at rest or going about her business to show she’s a regular girl in regular life mode, the shark will pounce and . . . depening upon whether this is topshark, lowshark, or kimonoshark attack . . . he will grab her clothes, pull hard, and expose her body.
Topsharking exposes the breasts, lowsharking exposed the panties (although this has evolved to the goal being to get the panties down to expose the pubic region), and kimonosharking is to target girls in kimonos. Occassionally, these fellows will engage in fullsharking which aims at removing the targets clothes completely.
Waiwai recently had a piece on the phenomenon Rip-and-run camera crews feed the popular ‘panty dropping’ DVD market, albeit without the full scope of the beastie . . .
Rip-and-run camera crews feed the popular ‘panty dropping’ DVD market. Large numbers of Japanese women are falling victim to teams of sneaky men who run up behind them, rip down their undies and then send footage of the attack throughout the world via the Internet, according to Shukan Jitsuwa. "These movies of guys lifting up women’s skirts and even tearing down their panties are spreading everywhere. At first, I thought they were all set-ups, but the footage with the women shocked at what they’ve just been put through is actually all real," a writer on Japan’s underground DVD market tells Shukan Jitsuwa. "They’re all underground movies, so the faces and other parts you see are all real. And it’s the horrified reaction of these women that’s apparently the biggest turn-on for the perverts who are into this kind of thing. They’re really popular." Naturally, the women being targeted for these heinous productions are outraged. And, with about 30 women being targeted for every DVD filled with footage of the attacks on sale, there are many people being victimized. "There are currently five DVDs on the market that specialize in Panty Dropping. Simple math suggests that at least 150 women have been targeted indiscriminately if each movie has 30 victims," the writer says. The method the filmmakers are using is simple. Film crews are made up of at least two people — one who operates the camera, and the other who actually does the shedding. Crews pick a target and follow her until they find what they consider to be the right spot, then one of the men races up behind her, whips up her dress, rips down her underwear and speeds off into the distance, with the whole episode over in a matter of seconds. Nearly all of the footage is captured in secluded residential districts, but there have been exceptions, including a bicycle parking area, an ATM and even a supermarket. Several women have been hurt during the sly attacks, but many of those who have been set upon have been so filled with anger, they’ve been unable to react quickly enough to go after their assailants, according to the lowbrow weekly, which adds that things could be about to get worse. "These filmmakers are flushed with success and now they’re becoming even more brazen," the writer tells Shukan Jitsuwa. "Now they’re going after women in tube tops and the latest footage shows them getting their tops ripped off."
It’s very much a hit and run phenomenon with very cheap invasive video techniques. Despite being recent, the article is obviously a littlle out of date as the topsharking hits have been around for awhile now. The lowsharking – hitting for pubic hair rather than just seeing panties – is more recent than topsharking to expose breasts and both are giving way to specialty kimonosharking and fullsharking which aims at actually getting the entire dress and underwear off to leave the woman’s entire body exposed as the shark runs off. Examples of various sharking video clips have been circulating on the internet for some time as the with some sites regularly linking to clips that are shared in various media sharing outlets. One such example is this Sharking Clips List (very much NSFW, seriously, I’m not kidding) which regularly updates. A few of the English language sites have begun sharing the clips as well so one would expect the phenomenon to start showing up in the West some time in the not so distant future – albeit, US regulations regarding video and invasion of privacy and non-consensual photography would make such products much more difficult to peddle (unless, like so much of the US-based "reality sex prank" business, the material were staged rather than actual events).
Recently, as fullsharking begins to have some examples appear, a new phenomenon which is another take on invasive sexuality is the bukkakesharking videos in which the female target is not expose but rather the video sharks will select a "target" and the shark will masterbate under a newspaper or the like on camera in the background while the woman sits oblivious to the activities of the fellow until he rushes over and ejaculates over her hair, face, and clothes then runs away, leaving the semen-covered woman to process what has just happened to her as she realizes just what is all over her. This takes creepiness to new levels.
The sharking and other videos are an example of the natural evolution of the whole frottage phenomenon so common in Japanese mass transit. Frottage (molesting women) on trains and busses has gotten so bad that more and more men take it as a common sport, a pleasant hobby. Women being conditioned not to make trouble or draw attention to themselves allow themselves to be groped with videomakers slipping in with cameras for a groping video market which feeds the idea that the behavior is somehow okay. The groping video market expanded to the point that in the last couple of years, sleepgroping videos have sprung up of men approaching women sleeping on public transport or in public parks and touching them and exposing their bodies while they sleep. Also, a new breed of groping gang videos has been born where groups of men target a woman in public, surround her, and essentially gang rape her by groping then stripping her then masterbating over her naked body . . . while the penetrative rape videos tend to be staged, there are plenty of examples of actual groping sets in the market to setup the feedback loop that somehow this behavior is masculine and okay.
After her recent trip to Tokyo, Lorraine characterized her impression that it seems many Japanese men have begun to consider groping on trains to be a sort of sport. That characterization is certainly not wrong. The train system has had to adapt by creating women-only cars, a lot of them just so women can avoid gropers. Of course, the trains are so crowded that not all women can take those cars and if you think about it, they shouldn’t need to.
A subculture among certain age women has also grown up of groper baiting, young women who dress provacatively (which unfortunately often means in school girl outfits cut short – yet another Japanese phenonmenon) and then ride the trains or busses in order to be groped as they find the experience of being touched by a strange man or group of men to be exhilirating and thrilling.
There’s really no one way to look at this stuff. Interesting cultural effects resembling the way that when one represses sexual impulses and desires that eventually those repressed desires manifest as a darker shadow behavior. Healthy consensual expression of sexual desire tends to avoid the darker more violent and certainly more objectifying forms seen in these videos. Fantasy and expresison of sexual desire should be encouraged within broad and open-minded healthy contexts . . . unfortunately, for many such healthy expression is not possible due to cultural or other constraints that force them to repress these urges which bottle up and then express themselves in wholly non-positive ways.
