Every mountain has more than one slippery slope. While Paul de Vries ("Back to the baths: Otaru revisited") is concerned with the worrying precedent of Debito Arudou's onsen lawsuit, de Vries sets an equally worrying precedent by implying that restrictions on "group accountability as a social conditioner" are inherently harmful. Group accountability can be employed fairly when it is narrow and rational.
If the problem is drunken foreigners unaware of bathing rules, the rational solution is to ban drunks and those unable to follow the rules. It is not to ban people associated with the problem group by virtue of some immutable characteristic like ethnicity. Indeed, Arudou has pressed public businesses to change from a "No Foreigners" policy to a "No Troublemakers," or even "Must Understand Japanese" policy, and many have happily obliged.
Even women-only train carriages — a broad solution to a broad problem — have been limited in number and placed at one end of the train so as to cause minimal inconvenience to most male passengers. A man can simply walk a few meters and board the next carriage. It is hard to compare this to one's exclusion from a public business that has few convenient alternatives.
The other slippery slope — that of group accountability as an unchecked excuse — has led to some of the greatest atrocities in human history. De Vries and, for that matter, the Japanese government would be well advised to keep this snowball from falling down either slope. Narrow and rational accountability is the only sustainable way to maintain both liberty and security.
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