On Thursday, a 48-year-old was referred to prosecution on suspicion of trespassing after he entered a women’s bath in broad daylight while cross-dressing. The man, a dispatched worker, initially claimed to identify as a woman, but later confessed he regularly cross-dressed as a “hobby,” and was “excited” to fulfill a fantasy to be “in a women’s bath dressed as a woman.”
Last year, on the morning of September 24, Katsufumi Miura dressed in “a mini-skirt, a transparent medical waterproof film covering his penis, makeup and a shoulder-length wig” and entered the women’s section of Kutsurogi no Sato Yuraku, a natural hot spring for adult and child day-bathing in Osaka City.
Staff at the spa who saw him were suspicious of the “strange person.”
There were five female customers in the bath as Mr Miura stripped down to his pubic covering.
The front desk was alerted to the presence of a man-looking person in the women’s bath. An employee went to check, and found a man grinning as he sat on the edge of the tub, looking around the bathhouse.
Mr Miura moved to the bathroom resting area and reclined there, still naked but for the film over his genitalia. A staff member confronted him: “You’re a man, right?” Mr Miura ignored the question. The staff member twice more demanded to know: “Are you a man?” Mr Miura finally replied, “No, I’m a woman.”
When the police arrived, Mr Miura professed: “My gender is male, but my heart is female.”
Police said they decided not to detain Mr Miura while they proceeded carefully with the investigation, as Mr Miura had cooperated with their request for an interview and wore a wig and mini-skirt to Osaka Prefectural Police’s Suminoe Station.
Mr Miura later changed his statement, telling police: “I want to be seen as a woman, but I’m not a woman at heart,” and “I’m not LGBT.” He said he cross-dresses because “I can’t be made to do heavy work, and it’s easier and more profitable to dress as a woman.”
According to police, Mr Miura proceeded to make incriminating statements. “I wanted to go into the women’s bath as a woman. I’ve always wanted to go to the women’s bath, and today I thought I wouldn’t be caught even if I went in the women’s bath because I was able to hide behind a good front cover.”
He further admitted: “I wanted to make sure my front was perfect by entering a women’s bath, and I was excited to see myself in a women’s bath dressed as a woman.”
Japanese newspaper Nikkan Gendai speculated that Mr Miura, who is “only interested in women and not men,” entered the bathhouse to be a “pervert.” Excite called it “shameful” that Mr Miura was “pretending to be transgender to satisfy his own desires.”
What's interesting is the clear contrast with how this would play out now in the West. A similar case from California last year at LA's WA Spa had an undressed man entering a women-only area. After complaints from some of the women, he was confronted by an outraged member of staff. In the press, it was the staff member who came in for criticism, while the man – the "transwoman" as he was immediately assumed to be – was seen as the victim of a bunch of vicious transphobes. Trans activists talked of the man's "female penis", and suggested that if young girls were offended by the sight of a semi-erect male member, they should just look the other way.
WA Spa put out a statement – "Like many other metropolitan areas, Los Angeles contains a transgender population, some of whom enjoy visiting a spa. Wi Spa strives to meet the needs of all its customers." They pointed out that California Civil Code 51(b) and 51(e)(5) makes it illegal for the spa to "discriminate" against transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
It was even suggested – and widely reported – that the whole business was a hoax designed to smear the trans community.
In the end a known sex offender was quietly arrested by the LA police.
How much better the Japanese handled the situation. And the offender, unable to count on a whole industry to support his claim that he was really a woman, had to admit the truth – that he was a man who got a sexual kick out of dressing as a woman and getting in to the woman-only area.
Mick Hartley 
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