Comments by Wyndham Miles in his Sept. 21 letter, "Shameful response to gropers," are based on a misunderstanding of Sumire Shigehara's Sept. 14 letter ("Women-only train cars are shameful"). Shigehara was not implying that molested women are dishonest or that Japanese people ignore gropers. Her point was that Japanese trains are so crowded that it is impossible to know what is going on sometimes and that, because of this, there are the unusual problems that Shigehara brought up.
This observation does not mean that people don't stop gropers if they see them in the act. In fact, they often help victims take gropers to police or train personnel so that the gropers are punished. They go beyond stopping molestation. By contrast, Miles' letter makes it sound as if people stop molestation in the United States but that the gropers are let go.
I don't want to over-generalize that Americans have a high tolerance of watching people die because of individual incidents in which a patient doesn't get the care he needs at a hospital or an accident victim is ignored by people around him. So, Miles should not over-generalize about Japanese people. Molesting a woman in public is not tolerated in Japan.