Convenience Store As Victim Shelter

[Mulboyne]

The Washington Post has an article on Japanese convenience stores with the following paragraph:

In cases of spouse abuse or any kind of crime, victims are welcomed at convenience stores, where a clerk will look after them under scalding fluorescent light until police arrive. Last year, 39,000 people fled to convenience stores for personal safety.

The article makes it sound like the this is a service actively offered by convenience stores. Anyone know if that's the case? I would have thought it's more that people take refuge in the nearest brightly lit public place which, at least at night, is odds-on to be a convenience store. However, the mention of "39,000" suggests that there might be something slightly more systematic.

[Taro Toporific]

[DrP]

This is bizarre - like in our neighborhood there are several of these Safety Spots combini - at the same time - conbini sex is one of the fastest growing genre of 'dogging' in Japan. Koban is just 50m away - but hey they don't have hotdogs and oden. The last thing I'd want is the midnight-to-8am conbini staff giving me an AED...

[Kuang_Grade]

Well, that washington post pieces is bit breezy, short and not particularly well detailed for front page story, but if the figures are correct, that's still less than one emergency visit per store per year on a nationwide basis.

[sublight]

The last thing I'd want is the midnight-to-8am conbini staff giving me an AED...

They'd probably be better at it than the J-Stone Cops.

[Mulboyne]

Thanks Taro. I can't recall seeing one of those signs before so didn't realize that the convenience store chains had formally declared themselves to be places of refuge. It does seem like purely a public relations act to overcome any local objections to new store openings and, as the other article you posted suggests, act as a counterargument to attempts to curtail their hours of business.