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The party is over for 'Super Free' sex gang
By Philip Brasor
June 29, 2003
The hormone-fueled stupidity that characterizes the behavior of your average
college student is a fact of life, and people who are bothered by the unsafe
sex, nonstop boozing and mindless pranks that typify spring break in the United
States usually advocate moderation rather than outright prohibition. They know
there's little they can do, especially when you've got MTV glorifying this kind
of knuckleheaded behavior every April.
In Japan, college students are no less hedonistic, and if there's a difference
it's mainly in the way the public looks upon their misbehavior. Americans
generally accept it as a rite of passage, while the Japanese see one's student
years as a four-year break in an otherwise drudgery-filled life.
Traditionally, young Japanese worked very hard, starting in early childhood, in
order to gain entrance to a good university. The reward was membership of the
college-going elite and the perks included a winking acknowledgment that,
unless you were a technology major or on track for an academic career, you
didn't have to sweat the studying part, because the bureaucracies and name
companies that eventually hired you didn't care what you studied since they
were going to retrain you anyway. They only cared about the pedigree, and for
that reason it was beholden to the universities themselves not to make too much
of scholastic achievement, since dropouts and poor performance would somehow
reflect badly on their image.
College is a four-year vacation, which means there are elements who will try to
make money out of it. One such person is Shinichiro Wada, the head of a
now-defunct Waseda "circle" (extra-curricular club) called Super Free, who,
along with four other male college students, was arrested two weeks ago for
gang-raping a 20-year-old female college student following one of Super Free's
parties in May.
Circles are normally athletic, artistic or academic, but Super Free was a
social club, and, from all reports, a money-making one. Wada's purpose,
according to a report on Nippon TV's evening news show, was to provide college
students with a social outlet so that their "campus life" could be more
enjoyable. Some of Wada's colleagues said he was making 10 million yen a year
with the circle, which is operated along the lines of a pyramid scheme, with
employees selling tickets to the circle's functions.
The reason for Super Free's success was that it was registered with Waseda, one
of the most elite private universities in Japan. Students from other Tokyo
schools bought tickets to Wada's parties to bathe in the Waseda aura. Women
were attracted because they wanted to meet Waseda men, and men -- whether
Waseda students or not -- joined because they knew lots of women would be there
to meet Waseda men.
Super Free depended on its Waseda connection to make money. Wada, who is 28,
transferred to the school after attending Chuo University for one year. He
spent seven years in Waseda's prestigious politics and economics department
before being expelled for failure to pay his tuition, and then entered Waseda's
lower track "second division" school, where he's now been for two years.
According to Nippon TV, the rape was not an isolated occurrence. Many male
students who joined the circle did so with the expectation of sex, which, if it
happens, follows the inevitable nijikai (second party) that follows the main
party and which is held at a smaller restaurant and involves heavy drinking.
Wada reportedly encouraged this expectation and has allegedly committed other
assaults in the past.
The announcement of the arrest came right on the heels of another scandal
involving the elite school. Several days before, a team of young extortionists
was arrested and one of them happened to be a Waseda student.
In fact, the reason the extortion group made it into the news was because of
that student's involvement. The kind of extortion they practiced involves
teenage girls who sleep with older men they meet through "telephone clubs." The
men are then blackmailed by young men who force them to make accounts at
consumer-loan companies that the group then taps into whenever it needs
spending money.
According to Aera, this sort of extortion has been on the rise for more than a
year, but received little media coverage until this particular group was caught
and found to include an "elite."
The accused "Super Free" rapists have said that the sex was consensual, a claim
that most people will find less than believable in a case involving five men
and one woman, but the "elite" factor has made it more of a bombshell than the
usual rape incidents, which are rarely covered in the media unless they involve
celebrities or U.S. servicemen. Some TV stations have broadcast head shots of
the five alleged rapists, which is very strange since the media usually don't
even reveal names. Documentary filmmaker Tatsuya Mori, in his Asahi Shimbun
column, speculated that the press is being especially harsh on the five because
they are connected to Waseda, even if only three of them are actually enrolled
at the prestigious university (one is from Nihon University and the other from
Gakushuin).
Is the media punishing those students because they want to give Waseda its
comeuppance or because they think that, since Waseda students are on a higher
plane than the rest of us, they have to be pulled down a little? Mori doesn't
say, but there's another possibility. Media people are usually graduates of
elite universities themselves. They could simply be punishing members of their
brotherhood who were stupid enough to get caught.
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