The Carriage Boundary Outside *Animal Crossing*: Has This Online Harassment Crossed the Line?

Once, I was on a long-distance bus and saw someone in the front row touching up her makeup the whole way. It actually felt a lot like walking into a public area in an open-world game, where everyone is assumed to follow a set of rules that aren’t written on the map: don’t be too loud, don’t take up too much space, and don’t force your presence into other people’s faces. But no matter how invisible the rules are, they should still have boundaries. You can’t just keep following a path and somehow end up climbing straight into someone else’s house.

Recently, a Japanese girl came under heavy attack from many Japanese netizens for filming herself putting on makeup on the Shinkansen. At first, the discussion was still focused on the issue itself: whether doing makeup on public transportation affects other people. Among the top-liked comments, some said bluntly, “If the person sitting next to me did that, it would be hell.” That comment received 15,000 likes; others said people should not put on makeup in vehicles because the smell can make others uncomfortable, and comments like that also got 4,000 likes.

If the discussion had stayed at the level of the behavior itself, I think it would still have been worth talking about. After all, public space is not a private room, especially in an enclosed environment like a train carriage, where smells, the size of one’s movements, and whether one takes up surrounding space can all affect others. From that perspective, Japanese netizens’ dislike of doing a “full face” of makeup was really an emphasis on boundaries in public space, and that logic isn’t hard to understand.

But the problem is that public opinion outside the map quickly spun out of control. Comments began to include vicious remarks like “badly brought up,” and even insulting terms with an explicitly shaming tone appeared. At that point, it was no longer about whether “this behavior is appropriate,” but about taking one specific action and directly escalating it into a sweeping judgment of the person, their family background, and their upbringing.

That’s also the part I find most irritating. It’s like when you’re exploring a map and originally just trying to see whether a path is passable, but someone ends up blowing up the entire area. Behavior can be criticized, but personal humiliation should not be packaged as “common social sense.” What’s more worth noting is that the article also mentioned an opposing view: society often scrutinizes women’s behavior in public more harshly, while disruptive habits commonly seen in some men—like shaking their legs, sitting with legs spread apart, or having a strong body odor—do not necessarily attract criticism on the same scale.

Seen within a broader trend, this is really a familiar old problem on social platforms: a public-etiquette topic that could have been discussed gets accelerated all the way by the like mechanism, and eventually veers into a zone of emotional venting. 4,000 likes, 1,000 likes, and then 15,000 likes—the higher the numbers, the easier it becomes for extreme expressions to look like the “correct route.” But highly liked does not mean insightful, and popularity does not mean reasonable.

If I had to give a judgment on this matter, my view is very simple: wearing makeup on public transportation can be discussed in terms of whether it is appropriate; but once it escalates into shaming and mob attacks, public opinion has already crossed the line. Truly mature public discussion should be like a well-designed open-world map, with clear boundaries and clear paths—you know where disagreement can be raised, and you also know where absolutely must not be stepped over.