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The story
A women-only study room on Kindai University’s Higashi-Osaka campus has drawn a wave of social media criticism calling it “discrimination against men,” after the university posted a video about it on X. The facility itself has existed for about nine years, since the new main building was built, but a 2026 renovation added new amenities — including a locker room — that are set up for women only, which fueled the backlash. The university, for its part, says that while the women-only study room has 107 seats, the Higashi-Osaka campus as a whole has roughly 4,800 study seats available, and that current students themselves haven’t raised any particular complaints. On 5ch, opinion split between “of course it’s needed as an anti-groping measure” and “the university is treating male students like potential criminals.”
Oct 20 (Tue), 8:40 AM JST
ENCOUNT
“Male Discrimination” Criticism Over Women-Only Study Room — How It Came to Be Installed
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Re: #3
>"Creating an environment where women can study with peace of mind is wonderful (∪^ω^)w"
Is it actually dangerous there?
At night especially, wouldn't you end up studying while keeping an eye on your surroundings?
But guys don't really want to go somewhere that's all guys.
Men want to mix in with women — or more like, they want to go into the women's bath, the women's restroom, the women's locker room.
It never works the other way around.
Seems like it'd get used for weird purposes.
Though I guess that's true for women too.
"Kindai's male students are criminals" must be the university's official stance, then.
If it's not written on the website, someone should request that they add it.
Even short of actual crime, guys with zero sense of personal space are annoying to have around while you're studying.
The more "party" a private school's reputation, the more boundary-less guys it tends to have.
Give them the bare minimum response and they convince themselves you're into them and get full of themselves.
Re: #23
Is it even worth the cost to keep a study room running that late into the night?
Unlike a national or public university, it's private so they have more freedom, but
7.6% [of revenue] is still taxpayer money.
Kindai University (school corporation), "Statement of Activities"
Item — FY2024 settlement
Subsidy income: ¥11.9405 billion
Total activity income: ¥157.0101 billion
Note: one-time subsidies for facility construction etc. are listed separately
The spot on the first floor that's completely visible from outside.
Digging up something that's been there since before COVID just to attack it now — how much free time do people have?
Looking at it the other way, it's already been 9 years, and
it kind of feels like they were just a bit careless releasing that video now.
it's meant exclusively for Kindai students to use — and on top of that, it's "so women can use it with peace of mind."
So the implication is that Kindai's male students are potential sex offenders.
Giving in to a momentary impulse happens often enough, so there's nothing wrong with cutting the risk.
If anything does happen, it's the university that gets held responsible anyway.
There are way too many guys who, the second a few of them get together, call it "just horsing around" and do upskirt photos or sexual assault with that bro mentality.
Meanwhile they'll mock a woman walking alone at night as "not careful enough,"
but the moment women actually take precautions, they screech about it being "overly self-conscious" or "discrimination against men."
90% of sexual assault and violent crime in this world is committed by men.
If anything, men aren't nearly wary enough of other men.
You never know when you yourself could become some man's prey, either.
chocoZAP [a 24-hour gym chain] is membership-only too, but since it runs unstaffed late into the night, there have been cases of guys clearly out to pick up women bothering or staring at female members —
which is exactly why some locations have opened women-only sections.
Even in libraries, there are guys who stalk women just because they're there.
Same reason some photo-sticker (purikura) booths ban men.
If groping didn't exist, the whole concept of "women-only" would never have come up.
It's because they don't have the guts to commit to that, that outsiders keep whining about it.
If you're going to call women-only discrimination, then just make a men-only study room too.
All the guys can use that one.
I'd rather they just plainly admit they're giving women preferential treatment.
"This was established with the aim of creating an environment where female students can study with even greater peace of mind and comfort, and of supporting every student in fully engaging with their studies. It is not intended to exclude or discriminate against students of any gender or attribute."
So basically, like women-only train cars — men can technically use it too?
Even the comments defending it are full of discriminatory attitudes, so you can tell gender equality just isn't happening.
https://p.potaufeu.asahi.com/0459-p/picture/27973918/1f9a2bc3a723e9670b380556c426a1c2_640px.jpg
Maybe that's the Miwa side of the Toden [Tokyo's old streetcar line]?
Turns out they renovated it in 2026 and added new stuff like a locker room.
And guess who's the only one allowed to use that new stuff — women only, lmaooo.
I'd love to see the face of whoever at Kindai thought this would fly.
The person who kicked off the complaints was probably a male student too — that's rough, honestly.
>According to the person in charge, the women-only study room has 107 seats, but study space isn't limited to the Academic Theater — about 4,800 seats are secured across the entire Higashi-Osaka campus as a whole.
Not what I expected, lol.
With that much study space available overall, no wonder the students themselves aren't complaining — it's only on social media that the "male discrimination" outcry is coming from.
It says right there that this started because of a video the university posted on X — can't you even read Japanese?
The ones kicking up a fuss are probably outside third parties who aren't even students anyway.
It's mid-tier among private universities and not exactly "elite" academically, but it has worldwide name recognition.
It's "famous" the same way Eromanga Island is — famous for the novelty of its name, not for any real achievement, lol (Eromanga Island is a real place in Vanuatu whose name sounds funny in Japanese, making it a running joke/tourist draw).
It's a rare university where the density of practical, applied research is totally out of proportion with its admission difficulty.
Its medicine and agriculture (fisheries) fields in particular are excellent.
Background and Key Issues
Women-only spaces on university campuses are a measure that has spread in recent years as a countermeasure against groping and voyeuristic photography, following the same pattern as the debates over women-only floors in commercial facilities or women-only train cars. What split opinion in the thread was a clash of values between “separation for the sake of safety” and “treating people differently purely by sex is discrimination.” The figure the university put forward — “107 seats out of roughly 4,800 overall” — was offered as evidence that, despite the scale of the backlash, the actual share of space involved is small. It’s easy to overlook, though, that this figure covers study seats as a whole and doesn’t really address the actual point of contention: whether women-only facilities like the locker room should exist at all. There are also claims that the facility itself had already existed for about nine years before the renovation, which suggests this controversy likely surfaced because the timing of adding a new feature (the locker room) to an existing facility coincided with a video going viral on social media. It’s also worth noting that the subsidy ratio raised in the thread (7.6% of income) is a figure for the university’s overall operating revenue, and isn’t direct evidence tied to the actual cost of running the study room.
*This article is composed as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (News Flash+) thread “[University] The “Male Discrimination” Debate Over Kindai’s Women-Only Study Room — What Do the Students Themselves Actually Think? The University’s Surprising Answer.”
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