Japan launches ‘Man on the curtain’ to protect women living alone

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As one of the largest metropolis in the world, Tokyo has a huge population of single women who live alone in the city. Although Japan has a relatively low crime rate, single women who live alone in big cities are still the crime target.

In order to protect the safety and reduce the fear of single women who live alone, a Tokyo apartment management company Leo Palace 21 designed a project called “Man on the curtain,” a system that could throw a virtual silhouette of a man onto the curtain, which made people looked outside think that there are more than one person living in the apartment.

"Man on the curtain" project /Japan Today Photo

But how does the system work? Women could connect their smartphones to the projector to control the “shadows of the virtual boyfriend” revealed on the curtains.

So far, there are 12 different options, including a man using vacuum cleaner, a musician playing the guitar, a boxer throwing punches and so on. Each video lasts for 30 minutes with various motions, which means that the system could provide with six-hour footage of man doing various exercises without repeat.

After this project had been reported on Chinese social media, questions concerned whether this project really help to protect single women who live alone and reduce the crime rates have been raised amongst Chinese netizens.

Women could use their smartphones to control the "shadows of man on the curtain." /Japan Today Photo

“This is a good idea, but if the system is made commercially available in the country, criminals will soon realize that the silhouette of man is fake and further confirm that apartments using this service are single women who live alone, which might increase the possibility of committing crimes,” commented by a user @zhangcunren on China’s Twitter-like Weibo.

“What if women living in the same building use the project at the same time? It will be easy for criminals to identify that the shadows are automatically made since they are repeated motions,” another user @weifengchuiluanlewodefa wrote on Weibo.

A woman sees her apartment from the outside with the silhouette of man appears on her windows. /Japan Today Photo

Therefore, although it is considerate to design such a project, there are still a lot of defects of this system since it has limited motions and is easily to be identified by people.

In recent years, metropolis in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, has a growing population of single women who leave their hometown and seek for personal development. However, as a lot of single women living in big cities reported encountering sexual harassment and robberies, the safety issue of single women living alone in big cities has become an important social issue in China.

Therefore, how to prevent single women who live alone in metropolis from being harassed and increase the sense of security of these women are the urgent issues that need to be tackled with both in China and abroad.