Street musicians fairly regularly perform here and there in Tokyo and - when I can afford to (and like the music) - I sometimes buy a CD or two from the musician (or musicians, but usually just one). I've had mixed luck with the CD's - some I have enjoyed listening to and some I didn't like as much as the live performance that prompted me to buy them in the first place.
A few weeks back, I bought a CD of some guitar music I particularly wanted to hear, but when I got home, the disk wouldn't play in my computer (I no longer have a CD player, so I have to listen to disks with my computer). It was a computer-made disk, so I'm not sure whether I just got a bad disk, or whether it has some kind of very heavy-handed mutations thrown in to stop people from copying it (I was hoping to make some MP3 files for my MP3 player).
Within the disks I can play, like them or not, I'm at least glad my money went directly to the artist. With regular commercial stuff, you have to wonder how much of your money actually finds it way back to the artist who made the music, so it's satisfying in a way to give it directly to the artist.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Friday, September 26, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
"Haunted Amusement Park"
A friend called, saying they had heard about a new ride at the Seibu-en Amusement Park (erroneous information I think, but...) and floated the idea of going there next weekend, so after hanging up, I got the bright/stupid idea of going out there after work this evening - thinking that I could get there before they closed at 9:00 ("or 10:00 p.m. maybe..." thought I), to ask about ticket prices, availability(?) of discount advance sales tickets, etc.
Although I did make it there just before 21:00, it took a bit longer than I had hoped it would to get there. I had forgotten how many train transfers were required and how long I would have to wait for some of the small branch line trains to come. Stepping off the train at Seibu-Yuenchi Station, I noticed the low number of people at the station ("Is the amusement park that unpopular, or is it closed?"), walked through the ticket gates, turned left, and walked down a wide, empty path towards the entrance of the amusement park (which I now realized was definitely closed). As I walked, I realized there were a fair number of fallen dead leaves in the path, so I simultaneously pondered the evidence of autumn having arrived while I thought "You've got to be kidding me - it's just before nine and they've already closed the park?".
I reached the gates more quickly than I expected (confusing Seibu-Yuenchi Station with Seibu-en Station, which requires a bit of a hike). and looked through the gates....
Blackness! Blackness with a dim outline of completely dark amusement park structures within. It was striking for three reasons - a) not only was the park closed, but it had obviously been closed for some time, b) I had never in my life seen a completely dark amusement park before, and c) in Tokyo it's very difficult to escape electric lights. The reason I always hear for the love of florescent tubes in this country is that things were dark and bad after the war, so people have (over)compensated for their dislike of darkness by light-blasting the entire city. Whether that is good or bad is a matter of personal opinion I guess (ignoring wasted power on unneeded excess and the harshness on the eyes), but I think the lighting in Tokyo could generally be done a little better. That said, new construction has been headed in that direction, and many new places have sensible and pleasant lighting, but I digress....
I didn't stand there for long, but the feeling was as though I had stumbled upon some long-lost remnant of civilization strangely intact and devoid of living people. I should have stayed a little longer to observe the atmosphere and think about it, but I was tired and wanted to get home, so I rushed back and got on the same train I had come there on, jumping on just before it began its return trip.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Although I did make it there just before 21:00, it took a bit longer than I had hoped it would to get there. I had forgotten how many train transfers were required and how long I would have to wait for some of the small branch line trains to come. Stepping off the train at Seibu-Yuenchi Station, I noticed the low number of people at the station ("Is the amusement park that unpopular, or is it closed?"), walked through the ticket gates, turned left, and walked down a wide, empty path towards the entrance of the amusement park (which I now realized was definitely closed). As I walked, I realized there were a fair number of fallen dead leaves in the path, so I simultaneously pondered the evidence of autumn having arrived while I thought "You've got to be kidding me - it's just before nine and they've already closed the park?".
I reached the gates more quickly than I expected (confusing Seibu-Yuenchi Station with Seibu-en Station, which requires a bit of a hike). and looked through the gates....
Blackness! Blackness with a dim outline of completely dark amusement park structures within. It was striking for three reasons - a) not only was the park closed, but it had obviously been closed for some time, b) I had never in my life seen a completely dark amusement park before, and c) in Tokyo it's very difficult to escape electric lights. The reason I always hear for the love of florescent tubes in this country is that things were dark and bad after the war, so people have (over)compensated for their dislike of darkness by light-blasting the entire city. Whether that is good or bad is a matter of personal opinion I guess (ignoring wasted power on unneeded excess and the harshness on the eyes), but I think the lighting in Tokyo could generally be done a little better. That said, new construction has been headed in that direction, and many new places have sensible and pleasant lighting, but I digress....
I didn't stand there for long, but the feeling was as though I had stumbled upon some long-lost remnant of civilization strangely intact and devoid of living people. I should have stayed a little longer to observe the atmosphere and think about it, but I was tired and wanted to get home, so I rushed back and got on the same train I had come there on, jumping on just before it began its return trip.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Saturday, September 20, 2008
"Empty Trains"
I recorded my trip to the beer garden at Mt. Takao after work one evening a few weeks ago, and have posted an edited version of that at YouTube here:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HV7O4jkTp5c
Some details about the scenes in the video:
00:01 - The Yamanote Line.
00:02 - Heading down the stairs at Shinjuku to the Keio Line platform.
00:04 - Getting on a "Jyunkyu-Kaisoku" (a sub-commuter express).
00:06 - Pulling out of Shinjuku Station. The people on the platform are waiting for the next time. This was taken during the peak of the evening rush for home.
00:11 - Manga reading on the trains is still liked by many, but you see less and less of it since cell phones became part of people's daily lives. Cell phones have become just about everything except telephones (you hardly ever see anyone actually talking of them these days), so people are basically carrying around very small computers that they do various types of computing on, which includes reading text on the screen (usually in the form of text-messaging, but also for electronic books), watching TV and movies, etc.
The announcement in the background - is in this case by a real human being, but (unfortunately) they are recordings most of the time.
00:12 - Typical view leaving central Tokyo.
00:14 - As the train gets further away from central Tokyo, there are fewer and fewer people (on this line in any case - on the Chuo Line, it is so long and passes through so many areas of major population, that there are people getting on just about everywhere on the line, so it basically just stays crowded all the time, all along the line).
00:19 - Transfer to another branch of the Keio Line - the one that goes to Takaozan-guchi Station, which is right at the base of Mt. Takao.
00:29 - Overhead luggage rack. Empty in this view, but in the morning in particular, it's usually full and most of the people standing (far more than are sitting) can't find space to put anything on it, even if they can reach it (around the doors in particular - less so in the middle, between the doors).
00:31 - Station towards the end of the line - people who live out here have a longer commute, but they are the ones who can sit down in the morning! I was in the last carriage of the train, so the voice is of the conductor as he closes the doors.
00:35 - Very few people at this point. It's a strange thing, but when the train gets this empty, and there is not the slightest worry about getting a seat, then boredom tends to kick in, unless you have an interesting book or magazine to read.
00:38 - Takao - the last major stop on the line, and a transfer point for the last part of the trip to Takaozan-guchi (sometimes, some trains go straight through to the base of the mountain).
00:39 - Almost completely empty - very few people are headed to the mountain in the late evening (it was the best I could do after work on the other side of town!)
00:44 - Mechanical door latch. Very rare on newer trains, but all the trains used to have this type of door handle and latch for the doors between the carriages.
00:49 - Last stop of the line! From here there is just a short walk to the cable-car station and an effortless ride to the top (well, the top of one ridge - the mountain goes higher from there).
00:54 - Pulling away from the lower station of the cable-car line.
00:57 - Going through the first of two tunnels. Fortunately, the cable-cars are old enough to have opening windows on the front and back, so you can look through clear and clean. (I really hate being sealed into boxes with windows that don't open - like a fish in an aquarium.)
00:59 - Passing the cable-car going down. They are hooked to each other via a cable, and act as counterweights to each other, so on the last ride down, when it's packed full, and the one going up is empty, the first steep hill up at the top creates a little speed before the grade lessens).
01:00 - Notice how the carriage is built like a moving staircase - the carriage is at a fairly steep angle, but the seats inside are (for most of the ride) straight. Also note that this is the only part of the line where there are two sets of tracks - otherwise, both the up and down rides use the same rails.
01:04 - The second tunnel - and the steepest part of the ride. This is the section that produces some speed going down when the downward-bound cable-car is heavily loaded and the upward-bound cable-car is empty.
01:09 - Headed up the stairs to the beer garden (Takaozan Beer Mount).
01:11 - Y3,300 for two hours of all you can eat and drink.
01:17 - Yes - just one plate and one beer - I went there alone, but ended up meeting some people there and having a drink and talk with them.
01:22 - Back to the cable-car for the ride back down the mountain.
01:23 - A view inside the cable-car, looking up towards the back - notice how steep it is.
01:34 - Speeding through the tunnel (in comparison to the speed of the rest of the ride in any case).
01:46 - Mountain stream - I had originally intended to use my laptop to write something at the top, but instead pulled it out at the base of the mountain, while sitting by the stream.
01:54 - A look at the hanging advertisements in the empty carriage I was in.
02:03 - The whole carriage to myself. In the morning crush-rush, it's hard to imagine that there are times when there is this much space!
02:04 - Looking out the open window before the train reaches Takao Station.
02:09 - On the JR platform at Takao Station. The train in upper background is the Keio Line, and the train coming in is a Chuo Line train.
02:12 - Old style long-distance train.
02:20 - More advertisements - this type of Chuo Line train is new - while there are still a few of the older type in service, they've almost completely phased in the newer type. The one thing I really hate on the new ones are the recorded announcements - on the old trains, they actually have a human being announcing the stations.
02:24 - What's this? Someone invading my private coach!
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HV7O4jkTp5c
Some details about the scenes in the video:
00:01 - The Yamanote Line.
00:02 - Heading down the stairs at Shinjuku to the Keio Line platform.
00:04 - Getting on a "Jyunkyu-Kaisoku" (a sub-commuter express).
00:06 - Pulling out of Shinjuku Station. The people on the platform are waiting for the next time. This was taken during the peak of the evening rush for home.
00:11 - Manga reading on the trains is still liked by many, but you see less and less of it since cell phones became part of people's daily lives. Cell phones have become just about everything except telephones (you hardly ever see anyone actually talking of them these days), so people are basically carrying around very small computers that they do various types of computing on, which includes reading text on the screen (usually in the form of text-messaging, but also for electronic books), watching TV and movies, etc.
The announcement in the background - is in this case by a real human being, but (unfortunately) they are recordings most of the time.
00:12 - Typical view leaving central Tokyo.
00:14 - As the train gets further away from central Tokyo, there are fewer and fewer people (on this line in any case - on the Chuo Line, it is so long and passes through so many areas of major population, that there are people getting on just about everywhere on the line, so it basically just stays crowded all the time, all along the line).
00:19 - Transfer to another branch of the Keio Line - the one that goes to Takaozan-guchi Station, which is right at the base of Mt. Takao.
00:29 - Overhead luggage rack. Empty in this view, but in the morning in particular, it's usually full and most of the people standing (far more than are sitting) can't find space to put anything on it, even if they can reach it (around the doors in particular - less so in the middle, between the doors).
00:31 - Station towards the end of the line - people who live out here have a longer commute, but they are the ones who can sit down in the morning! I was in the last carriage of the train, so the voice is of the conductor as he closes the doors.
00:35 - Very few people at this point. It's a strange thing, but when the train gets this empty, and there is not the slightest worry about getting a seat, then boredom tends to kick in, unless you have an interesting book or magazine to read.
00:38 - Takao - the last major stop on the line, and a transfer point for the last part of the trip to Takaozan-guchi (sometimes, some trains go straight through to the base of the mountain).
00:39 - Almost completely empty - very few people are headed to the mountain in the late evening (it was the best I could do after work on the other side of town!)
00:44 - Mechanical door latch. Very rare on newer trains, but all the trains used to have this type of door handle and latch for the doors between the carriages.
00:49 - Last stop of the line! From here there is just a short walk to the cable-car station and an effortless ride to the top (well, the top of one ridge - the mountain goes higher from there).
00:54 - Pulling away from the lower station of the cable-car line.
00:57 - Going through the first of two tunnels. Fortunately, the cable-cars are old enough to have opening windows on the front and back, so you can look through clear and clean. (I really hate being sealed into boxes with windows that don't open - like a fish in an aquarium.)
00:59 - Passing the cable-car going down. They are hooked to each other via a cable, and act as counterweights to each other, so on the last ride down, when it's packed full, and the one going up is empty, the first steep hill up at the top creates a little speed before the grade lessens).
01:00 - Notice how the carriage is built like a moving staircase - the carriage is at a fairly steep angle, but the seats inside are (for most of the ride) straight. Also note that this is the only part of the line where there are two sets of tracks - otherwise, both the up and down rides use the same rails.
01:04 - The second tunnel - and the steepest part of the ride. This is the section that produces some speed going down when the downward-bound cable-car is heavily loaded and the upward-bound cable-car is empty.
01:09 - Headed up the stairs to the beer garden (Takaozan Beer Mount).
01:11 - Y3,300 for two hours of all you can eat and drink.
01:17 - Yes - just one plate and one beer - I went there alone, but ended up meeting some people there and having a drink and talk with them.
01:22 - Back to the cable-car for the ride back down the mountain.
01:23 - A view inside the cable-car, looking up towards the back - notice how steep it is.
01:34 - Speeding through the tunnel (in comparison to the speed of the rest of the ride in any case).
01:46 - Mountain stream - I had originally intended to use my laptop to write something at the top, but instead pulled it out at the base of the mountain, while sitting by the stream.
01:54 - A look at the hanging advertisements in the empty carriage I was in.
02:03 - The whole carriage to myself. In the morning crush-rush, it's hard to imagine that there are times when there is this much space!
02:04 - Looking out the open window before the train reaches Takao Station.
02:09 - On the JR platform at Takao Station. The train in upper background is the Keio Line, and the train coming in is a Chuo Line train.
02:12 - Old style long-distance train.
02:20 - More advertisements - this type of Chuo Line train is new - while there are still a few of the older type in service, they've almost completely phased in the newer type. The one thing I really hate on the new ones are the recorded announcements - on the old trains, they actually have a human being announcing the stations.
02:24 - What's this? Someone invading my private coach!
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Sunday, September 07, 2008
"Fiction-Toxic People"
Fictional novels. Fictional movies. Fictional computer space-war games. Fictional TV science fiction shows. Fictional news. Fictional speeches (written by PR agencies; spoken by politicians-for-hire)....
I wouldn't have believed that anyone could live with so much fiction, but I have seen it in person too many times. I guess these fiction-people need simplicity - and so the fact that truth is stranger than fiction makes the real world a thing to reject with fear and hostility.
Shades of GO's 1984, is it any wonder then that blatant lies & genuine propaganda from organizations with sinister agendas are more easily believed by fiction-people than the truth? Presented with the truth, these fiction-addicts become hysterical and claim that the truth is a lie, is "propaganda", that someone has an "agenda". They use the theme words their string pullers feed them in daily doses of fictionalized news. Blind to their mindless servitude, they call the truth propaganda, ignore that their string-pullers have an agenda, and accuse someone genuinely working for the public good of having an agenda. A murderer walking away from a crime scene may as well point a finger at the police and accuse them of the murder - it's the same concept.
How about the rest of us? Those of us who find most fiction a simplistic and boring way to waste a chunk of our lives (periodic escapes from reality via a good movie seen once-in-a-while are enjoyed by nearly all of course), and can (usually) see the truth as the truth, and lies as lies? Is there any help for the hysterical people who cling to the lies their string-pullers feed them and blood-thirstily attack any glimpse of the truth?
Be fiction-toxic people a majority - we're doomed.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
I wouldn't have believed that anyone could live with so much fiction, but I have seen it in person too many times. I guess these fiction-people need simplicity - and so the fact that truth is stranger than fiction makes the real world a thing to reject with fear and hostility.
Shades of GO's 1984, is it any wonder then that blatant lies & genuine propaganda from organizations with sinister agendas are more easily believed by fiction-people than the truth? Presented with the truth, these fiction-addicts become hysterical and claim that the truth is a lie, is "propaganda", that someone has an "agenda". They use the theme words their string pullers feed them in daily doses of fictionalized news. Blind to their mindless servitude, they call the truth propaganda, ignore that their string-pullers have an agenda, and accuse someone genuinely working for the public good of having an agenda. A murderer walking away from a crime scene may as well point a finger at the police and accuse them of the murder - it's the same concept.
How about the rest of us? Those of us who find most fiction a simplistic and boring way to waste a chunk of our lives (periodic escapes from reality via a good movie seen once-in-a-while are enjoyed by nearly all of course), and can (usually) see the truth as the truth, and lies as lies? Is there any help for the hysterical people who cling to the lies their string-pullers feed them and blood-thirstily attack any glimpse of the truth?
Be fiction-toxic people a majority - we're doomed.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Osaki, Shinagawa (Tokyo) - 18:30
September 3rd, 2008
Osaki, Shinagawa (Tokyo) - 18:30
"Seeking Connectivity"
Every time (cough-cough) I've come to (cough-cough) this office complex in Osaki (cough-cough), I've seen people sitting around with their laptops happily(?) computing away, so I thought there might be Free Public Wireless here... (Phew - the prevailing winds have shifted and the - cough-cough, uggghh.... grrrrrr - foul leaf-fire smoke is - slightly - less intense than it was a minute ago)... but while my computer is detecting fifteen different broadcasts, they are all private networks requiring passwords, etc. The search for "Free Public WiFi" turned up nothing. Wait a second... I should check with my provider - maybe they have a broadcast that I can tune into.
Paper tubes of dried leaves for lighting afire and inhaling - there must be a new (new to Japan in any case) exotic type of toxic leaf that is popular to ingest - one of my apartment building neighbors torments me with it (when it's more than I can bear, I fight smoke with smoke by lighting up a few sticks of Indian super-strength incense), and one of my....
.... former (with a sore throat and on the verge of committing murder, I discovered a free seat in the non-toxic area) seat-mates here in Osaki is trying to poison himself and those around him... Okay-okay!! Rant over!!
"Roofed Sidewalk Tables" (18:50)
The trouble with having outdoor tables in Japan is that the weather - for one reason or another - generally isn't all that nice for sitting outside. It's too cold in the winter, vast quantities of pollen fly in the early spring, the raining season kicks in in late spring, humid heat comes in July and August, typhoons in late summer, early autumn, and then - after a brief period of pleasant temperatures and nice colors - the dry, windy cold (of Tokyo - a different type of cold in other parts of the country) is back. So it's no surprise that there are not many outdoor cafes, etc.
But there is a way - and I'm sitting in it. There is a large ring of round tables with chairs a floor above a plaza, which also has the same type of round tables with chairs in the middle. The seating is free and there is only one area for burning dried leaves (I'll try harder to never sit anywhere near that toxic zone again). What enables this to work is that it's inside - with large curved windows looking out on a green garden (which has some chairs and tables for the rare days when it's nice to sit outside). Maybe there are some other areas like this in Tokyo, but I can't think of them offhand. There are no end of places you can pay to sit, but a free place with decent chairs and tables... very nice, but not the norm.
[Later] - After packing my computer into my backpack, I went out to the outside part and discovered that it had cooled down from the day's earlier heat and was actually pretty nice out - but I was running shy on time, so I couldn't spend much time there.
"Living in the Wonderful Future" (19:02)
Plugged into my Creative audio file player (not an iPod), typing on a laptop computer, with a cell phone sitting by the computer with the screen rotated to horizontal, displaying a digital TV broadcast (with Japanese subtitles since the sound is set to off). Technology - in my ears, at the tips of my fingers, and showing some really stupid TV show on my phone. (I turned on the TV specifically to get a Technology Rush, not because there was actually something I wanted to see.)
This makes me wonder how these wonderful gadgets seem to post-twelve, pre-twenty people (oh yeah, there's a word for those creatures - "teenagers"). I guess cell phones, anywhere connectivity, and music in the ears is like rain falling from the sky and sunlight showing up on a regular basis to light the world for free. For those people, allow me to express a different perspective:
Several decades ago, I would watch futuristic movies and TV shows and think "That would be nice - but we'll never really be able to make TV's that small and effortlessly easy to use" (my family's TV at the time had a number of "special instructions" issues such as needing to physically whack it on a certain spot on the side from time-to-time to get the picture back), "and computers will never be quite that smart and compact all at the same time". And so I feel a little like I'm dreaming about something from a science fiction book rather than actually living it.
About to move on to something else - after sitting back and contemplating people making fools of themselves on TV and contentedly listening to a favorite song - and I suddenly remembered I have a video camera sitting in my bag. I briefly considered it placing that on the table to intensify the Technology Rush, but decided against it. It would be like one more drink that doesn't make you feel better, but rather tips you in the other direction, so I left it in the bag. I mean... what would everyone in Osaki think? "Hee-hee! Look at that Tech-bozo! Trying to show off his gadgets! Pathetic loser! Ha-ha-ha!" etc. I mean... not that it matters what people think really, but there would be no reason to pull out that technology and sit it on the table, other than to just look at the object. The cell phone, music player, and computer are all out for a reason.
"Out of Words...?"
All this time wishing I had a laptop to write with outside and now here I am - with a laptop in front of me eagerly awaiting as many words as I can type in in the time I have, and after writing a few paragraphs, suddenly I'm drawing a blank. Ah... maybe the aftereffects of the Tech-Buzz? Take a deep breath Lyle, relax... let the thoughts settle down and organize themselves.
[Later] No - that was it. It was just time to go. As I mentioned above, I then went outside and noticed how nice it was in the outside garden, but didn't have time to hang around, so I went back to Osaki Station and got on the Yamanote Line.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Osaki, Shinagawa (Tokyo) - 18:30
"Seeking Connectivity"
Every time (cough-cough) I've come to (cough-cough) this office complex in Osaki (cough-cough), I've seen people sitting around with their laptops happily(?) computing away, so I thought there might be Free Public Wireless here... (Phew - the prevailing winds have shifted and the - cough-cough, uggghh.... grrrrrr - foul leaf-fire smoke is - slightly - less intense than it was a minute ago)... but while my computer is detecting fifteen different broadcasts, they are all private networks requiring passwords, etc. The search for "Free Public WiFi" turned up nothing. Wait a second... I should check with my provider - maybe they have a broadcast that I can tune into.
Paper tubes of dried leaves for lighting afire and inhaling - there must be a new (new to Japan in any case) exotic type of toxic leaf that is popular to ingest - one of my apartment building neighbors torments me with it (when it's more than I can bear, I fight smoke with smoke by lighting up a few sticks of Indian super-strength incense), and one of my....
.... former (with a sore throat and on the verge of committing murder, I discovered a free seat in the non-toxic area) seat-mates here in Osaki is trying to poison himself and those around him... Okay-okay!! Rant over!!
"Roofed Sidewalk Tables" (18:50)
The trouble with having outdoor tables in Japan is that the weather - for one reason or another - generally isn't all that nice for sitting outside. It's too cold in the winter, vast quantities of pollen fly in the early spring, the raining season kicks in in late spring, humid heat comes in July and August, typhoons in late summer, early autumn, and then - after a brief period of pleasant temperatures and nice colors - the dry, windy cold (of Tokyo - a different type of cold in other parts of the country) is back. So it's no surprise that there are not many outdoor cafes, etc.
But there is a way - and I'm sitting in it. There is a large ring of round tables with chairs a floor above a plaza, which also has the same type of round tables with chairs in the middle. The seating is free and there is only one area for burning dried leaves (I'll try harder to never sit anywhere near that toxic zone again). What enables this to work is that it's inside - with large curved windows looking out on a green garden (which has some chairs and tables for the rare days when it's nice to sit outside). Maybe there are some other areas like this in Tokyo, but I can't think of them offhand. There are no end of places you can pay to sit, but a free place with decent chairs and tables... very nice, but not the norm.
[Later] - After packing my computer into my backpack, I went out to the outside part and discovered that it had cooled down from the day's earlier heat and was actually pretty nice out - but I was running shy on time, so I couldn't spend much time there.
"Living in the Wonderful Future" (19:02)
Plugged into my Creative audio file player (not an iPod), typing on a laptop computer, with a cell phone sitting by the computer with the screen rotated to horizontal, displaying a digital TV broadcast (with Japanese subtitles since the sound is set to off). Technology - in my ears, at the tips of my fingers, and showing some really stupid TV show on my phone. (I turned on the TV specifically to get a Technology Rush, not because there was actually something I wanted to see.)
This makes me wonder how these wonderful gadgets seem to post-twelve, pre-twenty people (oh yeah, there's a word for those creatures - "teenagers"). I guess cell phones, anywhere connectivity, and music in the ears is like rain falling from the sky and sunlight showing up on a regular basis to light the world for free. For those people, allow me to express a different perspective:
Several decades ago, I would watch futuristic movies and TV shows and think "That would be nice - but we'll never really be able to make TV's that small and effortlessly easy to use" (my family's TV at the time had a number of "special instructions" issues such as needing to physically whack it on a certain spot on the side from time-to-time to get the picture back), "and computers will never be quite that smart and compact all at the same time". And so I feel a little like I'm dreaming about something from a science fiction book rather than actually living it.
About to move on to something else - after sitting back and contemplating people making fools of themselves on TV and contentedly listening to a favorite song - and I suddenly remembered I have a video camera sitting in my bag. I briefly considered it placing that on the table to intensify the Technology Rush, but decided against it. It would be like one more drink that doesn't make you feel better, but rather tips you in the other direction, so I left it in the bag. I mean... what would everyone in Osaki think? "Hee-hee! Look at that Tech-bozo! Trying to show off his gadgets! Pathetic loser! Ha-ha-ha!" etc. I mean... not that it matters what people think really, but there would be no reason to pull out that technology and sit it on the table, other than to just look at the object. The cell phone, music player, and computer are all out for a reason.
"Out of Words...?"
All this time wishing I had a laptop to write with outside and now here I am - with a laptop in front of me eagerly awaiting as many words as I can type in in the time I have, and after writing a few paragraphs, suddenly I'm drawing a blank. Ah... maybe the aftereffects of the Tech-Buzz? Take a deep breath Lyle, relax... let the thoughts settle down and organize themselves.
[Later] No - that was it. It was just time to go. As I mentioned above, I then went outside and noticed how nice it was in the outside garden, but didn't have time to hang around, so I went back to Osaki Station and got on the Yamanote Line.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
"Back to the Ramparts?"
Or maybe "Full Lifeboat Syndrome"
September 1st, 2008, 20:20
Takao, Hachioji (Tokyo)
There were two parts to this and I've forgotten the first part, but here's the second part. I was in an electronics store in Shinjuku looking at video cameras. Well... I wasn't just looking, I was about to buy one - my first video camera since #4 burned out in 1992. The first uploaded video from it is here:
"Tokyo Perpetual Motion - August 2008"
In any case, at the electronics store, I asked the salesperson (I could have said "salesman" - he was a male biped after all, but... whatever) "how do you change the menu language?", to which he told me that they had disabled that function(!). I looked at him with a "What? In the 21st Century? Dude!" look, and he explained that there had been a problem with people buying cameras in Japan either before they were released overseas or at a lower price, and then reselling them overseas, making overseas distributors unhappy, so... they disabled the ability to use the new machines sold in Japan with anything other than the local language, Japanese.
I thought about that, and it seemed significant, especially when put together with the other thing I was thinking of.... What was it? Tougher immigration laws? A renewed nationalism? Something....
"New Laptop"
I don't have enough text to make an article with one topic, so here are some other things on my mind. I have been thinking how I would very much like to have a laptop to write with while I'm outside, and so... I bought a new laptop - my first new laptop since 1996. I bought a string of used ones that worked for a few years after that new-in-1996 one burned out in 1997, but I have gotten along without a laptop for many years now - waiting until I get home to write things. Now and again I've pulled out a pen and paper and written something by hand outside, which is fun, but then I've had to transcribe it later, which is no fun at all (in fact I still have some text from last week awaiting my pounding it into electrons), so it's about time I got my hands on a proper portable writing machine.
"Takao Beer Mount"
No, I didn't make that one up, that's the name of a rooftop beer garden on Takao Mountain that I visited tonight, and after coming down off the mountain (but before getting back on a train for central Tokyo), I sat myself down by a mountain stream (on a bench - hey - I'm a city slicker after all) and pulled out the new laptop to enter some text. So, as I type this, I'm listening to the sound of mountain stream water running by... and it's about time to get a train for home, so... that's all for now. Laptop computers - Banzai!!!
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
September 1st, 2008, 20:20
Takao, Hachioji (Tokyo)
There were two parts to this and I've forgotten the first part, but here's the second part. I was in an electronics store in Shinjuku looking at video cameras. Well... I wasn't just looking, I was about to buy one - my first video camera since #4 burned out in 1992. The first uploaded video from it is here:
"Tokyo Perpetual Motion - August 2008"
In any case, at the electronics store, I asked the salesperson (I could have said "salesman" - he was a male biped after all, but... whatever) "how do you change the menu language?", to which he told me that they had disabled that function(!). I looked at him with a "What? In the 21st Century? Dude!" look, and he explained that there had been a problem with people buying cameras in Japan either before they were released overseas or at a lower price, and then reselling them overseas, making overseas distributors unhappy, so... they disabled the ability to use the new machines sold in Japan with anything other than the local language, Japanese.
I thought about that, and it seemed significant, especially when put together with the other thing I was thinking of.... What was it? Tougher immigration laws? A renewed nationalism? Something....
"New Laptop"
I don't have enough text to make an article with one topic, so here are some other things on my mind. I have been thinking how I would very much like to have a laptop to write with while I'm outside, and so... I bought a new laptop - my first new laptop since 1996. I bought a string of used ones that worked for a few years after that new-in-1996 one burned out in 1997, but I have gotten along without a laptop for many years now - waiting until I get home to write things. Now and again I've pulled out a pen and paper and written something by hand outside, which is fun, but then I've had to transcribe it later, which is no fun at all (in fact I still have some text from last week awaiting my pounding it into electrons), so it's about time I got my hands on a proper portable writing machine.
"Takao Beer Mount"
No, I didn't make that one up, that's the name of a rooftop beer garden on Takao Mountain that I visited tonight, and after coming down off the mountain (but before getting back on a train for central Tokyo), I sat myself down by a mountain stream (on a bench - hey - I'm a city slicker after all) and pulled out the new laptop to enter some text. So, as I type this, I'm listening to the sound of mountain stream water running by... and it's about time to get a train for home, so... that's all for now. Laptop computers - Banzai!!!
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
"Reactions - August 2008"
Towards the end of the day at work, I began to imagine myself going out to Mt. Takao. The closer to quitting time, the more it seemed like a good idea, so after work, I took a Keio Line Jun-Tokkyu train ("Limited Special Express"; one step slower than a "Tokkyu", or Special Express) out as far as I could, before changing to a local train near the end that veers off the main line and goes to the foot of Mt. Takao (Takaozan-guchi Station), and thus began a string of encounters that were ordinary in a way, but conveyed a lot on reflection and in context with the past 24 years I've spent in Tokyo.
There were a number of people who walked across the platform from the express to the local, but after the next stop, most people got off and I became aware of empty seats and a woman (around 20?) sitting next to me. She stood up and walked down the car and took another seat. I thought "I hope that isn't because I smell sweaty or something..." but then I noticed that we were the only two people in that train car, so had to admit that if I were a 20-year-old woman and found myself alone with a post-forty man in a train car, I would either actually move, or at least want to move, so... I couldn't complain.
As the train began the last leg of the trip, I turned around, opened the window, and kneeling on the seat, I contemplated the dark forested mountain passing by outside. Nearly always in the unhealthy glow of florescent lighting, the lack of that much-hated form of lighting (I know - it's energy efficient - but I really hate the quality of light florescent tubes generate) is something I often dream of, but faced with the concept of walking into that light-less (other than whatever light there was from the moon) night forest, I had to admit the attraction of city life as opposed to something more primitive.
As the train pulled into the last station, I shut the window and got off as soon as the sliding doors opened. Exiting the ticket gates, I turned right and walked up the path beneath the trees in the night, with the sky above (not to be taken for granted in Tokyo) to the cable car station. This path was quite nice - just enough light to see, without damaging the ambiance of the night, and just enough other people about that there was no urge to look over your shoulder while walking along a lonely path in the night.
As I neared the cable car station, it was apparent that the cable car was about to depart - and since they don't run very often, I hoped to make it to avoid the wait for the next one. There were three people in front of me - a man and a couple. There was only one ticket machine on (the others turned off because it was late I guess), so by the time I was stuffing a bill into the machine, I heard the chain go up behind the couple, but I grabbed my ticket as it came out of the machine and ran up to the gate "Dame desu ka...?" I asked the guy ("No good?") and he gave me a rather unfriendly look, but wordlessly took the chain down again, so I gave him a "Sumimasen" ("Sorry!") as I had him punch my ticket. Slightly wondering about the scowl and the fact that he had put up the chain after having seem me behind the others, I was nevertheless happy to not be left behind, so I ran to the cable car to avoid any more delay than necessary.
The ride up went about as well as it might - I was lucky to get a standing spot at the back where I could look back down the mountain out of the open window as the cable car climbed. Midway up, a child sitting nearby wanted to stand by the window as well, but their parents told them it was dangerous - which got me to thinking "How? Leaning out a side window can be dangerous, but the back window isn't so low that someone might fall out, and even if you completely hang your head out the window in back, there's nothing to hit it." It's an old fault of mine - I like real reasons, not convenient and lazy lies.
The cable car goes through a tunnel, and then as it begins to climb more steeply, the lights of Tokyo appear from over the top of the mountain that the cable car just passed though. Many of the people in the car seemed to be taking it up the mountain for the first time - while I've done so... ten times? Fifteen times? I'm not sure, but in any case I'm familiar with the ride and exactly when it ends, so as it was coming to a stop, I grabbed my backpack and walked up to the front of the car so I'd been one of the first ones off. Once off, I skipped the (slightly expensive) beer garden and speed walked over to the free benches which still have a pretty decent view. I was pleased to see that one of them was open (on the far right, next to the pay-binoculars), so I sat there and took out the food and drink I'd bought on the way (at a grocery store back in central Tokyo), and put it on the table-like shelf in front of the benches. "Perfect" I thought....
Not long after I sat down, a group in their forties or fifties materialized to my right - and one of the men wanted to put Y100 in the pay-binoculars, but was dissuaded from doing so by someone in the group. I thought "Aw, come on, let the guy give it a try". I have spent my life seeing those pay-to-use binoculars, but have never actually used one (not that I can remember anyway), so I was sort of hoping to see one in action. Since the binoculars were right next to where I was sitting, the man seemed to notice my radio waves, and he looked over - seeing a foreigner, he asked me "Good view?", to which I answered "Tashikani" ("Indeed"), which produced a laugh from the group, which seemed to expect me to be a tourist. One of the men said "Yokeina koto wo shite..." to the man (not easy to translate, but something like "You should mind your own business"). They headed off, and a woman in the group turned around and said "Have a good time", to which I wordlessly nodded. She may have intended it to be friendly, but it didn't feel friendly and I took it to mean something like "You may have gotten one of our expressions right, but you are not one of us." [What's that sound I hear - groaning? Booing? You think I'm wildly imagining things? Whatever - you jump in a time machine, go to 1984 Tokyo, live here for 24 years, and then see if you still have the same opinion. I've met all kinds of people here over the past 24 years - and there are good and bad - just like everywhere in the world.]
After that, I tried to forget about the group who were young in Japan in the eighties, when it was more insular, more xenophobic, and more narrow minded than it is now. As I had some more wine & dried mangoes (I know - weird - but they actually go together for some reason), the happy sounds of a young couple (with the woman pregnant) sitting to my left drifted over and I got back into the mountain vibes....
Later on, the couple stood up, pulled out a camera and proceeded to take their own picture (at arm's length). I considered asked them if they'd like to take their picture, but stopped myself with "They're perfectly able to take their own picture". They took a flash picture, then another, and by their third picture, and with the answer in mind, I said (in Japanese) "You should turn the flash off" - which produced blank stares, so I realized they didn't know how. "Is that an Olympus?" The man continued looking at me, but the woman acknowledged that it was indeed an Olympus (it was her camera I guess), so I told them "It should have a circle of four buttons, with a button in the center of the circle. One of the four buttons should turn off the flash..." The woman found the button, got to the "No flash" symbol, and I said "Now, push the middle button..." which worked.
The setting changed, I asked them if they'd like me to take a picture - which they did, so they handed the camera over. The resulting picture showed the two of them in front of the lights of the city in the background (which the flash pictures didn't). I briefly explained that while the exposure was good, since the flash was off in such a dark place, the shutter speed was bound to be slow. I got them to expand the image a bit to see if it was sharp, or motion blurred. It seemed to be sharp, and they indicated that they liked it (expressing surprise at how bright the picture turned out without the flash). They said their (friendly) good-byes and headed off to the cable car.
I sat there and tried to piece it all together - the more relaxed young generation (with some dangerous hot-head exceptions) and the more up-tight older generation that I've spent 24 years here with (who tend to be more responsible than the current twenties people). Basically, it must just be a situation where some things get better and some things get worse. It's a blazingly-bright obvious concept, but still you expect things to get better without the good parts deteriorating, so it's an unpleasant surprise to discover the loss of an aspect to life that you thought was unshakably constant and solid....
After a while, I noticed a pair of twenties men (probably college students) explaining about camera ISO settings to a group of five twenties women. After the men left, I could hear one of the women asking what they were going on about, and another woman said "something about ISO this and that..." so I ended up (stupidly) jumping up and explaining that the numbers tied in with shutter speeds at f16 (what used to be the smallest aperture on most proper cameras), thus ISO 400 would basically mean 1/400 of a second shutter speed in bright sun at f16. They politely tolerated my lecture and then went on there way - joking that the night was full of camera education. I sat there and thought to myself, "What you did for the couple was good, but jumping up to explain the meaning of ISO settings to the group of five was really a dumb thing to do...".
By and by, I decided to go back down the mountain, so I got on the cable car and ended up talking with a man who was part of a group from the beer garden (on the roof of a building up behind where I was sitting). It was a friendly enough conversation, but he called me a "henna-gaijin" ("strange foreigner") apparently because I spoke Japanese. I used to get that from time-to-time (another eighties thing). If you were comfortable in the culture here and spoke the language, you were strange. If you didn't understand the language or culture, and you bumbled around expecting everyone you came in contact with to help you in English - well... that was a normal foreigner!
Back on a train speeding towards central Tokyo, I sat down and found myself in one of those on-a-stage situations that the bench seats against the windows facing each other generate. There was a group of about five men across from me who were interested in who was sitting across from them - so they were taking surreptitious looks. Not staring mind you, but the interest was in the air and I couldn't relax, so at the next station I casually moved over to another seat without an audience (late night trains headed towards Tokyo are not crowded and you can nearly always sit down - in contrast to the usual situation of always standing.
Back in the city... back to normal....
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
There were a number of people who walked across the platform from the express to the local, but after the next stop, most people got off and I became aware of empty seats and a woman (around 20?) sitting next to me. She stood up and walked down the car and took another seat. I thought "I hope that isn't because I smell sweaty or something..." but then I noticed that we were the only two people in that train car, so had to admit that if I were a 20-year-old woman and found myself alone with a post-forty man in a train car, I would either actually move, or at least want to move, so... I couldn't complain.
As the train began the last leg of the trip, I turned around, opened the window, and kneeling on the seat, I contemplated the dark forested mountain passing by outside. Nearly always in the unhealthy glow of florescent lighting, the lack of that much-hated form of lighting (I know - it's energy efficient - but I really hate the quality of light florescent tubes generate) is something I often dream of, but faced with the concept of walking into that light-less (other than whatever light there was from the moon) night forest, I had to admit the attraction of city life as opposed to something more primitive.
As the train pulled into the last station, I shut the window and got off as soon as the sliding doors opened. Exiting the ticket gates, I turned right and walked up the path beneath the trees in the night, with the sky above (not to be taken for granted in Tokyo) to the cable car station. This path was quite nice - just enough light to see, without damaging the ambiance of the night, and just enough other people about that there was no urge to look over your shoulder while walking along a lonely path in the night.
As I neared the cable car station, it was apparent that the cable car was about to depart - and since they don't run very often, I hoped to make it to avoid the wait for the next one. There were three people in front of me - a man and a couple. There was only one ticket machine on (the others turned off because it was late I guess), so by the time I was stuffing a bill into the machine, I heard the chain go up behind the couple, but I grabbed my ticket as it came out of the machine and ran up to the gate "Dame desu ka...?" I asked the guy ("No good?") and he gave me a rather unfriendly look, but wordlessly took the chain down again, so I gave him a "Sumimasen" ("Sorry!") as I had him punch my ticket. Slightly wondering about the scowl and the fact that he had put up the chain after having seem me behind the others, I was nevertheless happy to not be left behind, so I ran to the cable car to avoid any more delay than necessary.
The ride up went about as well as it might - I was lucky to get a standing spot at the back where I could look back down the mountain out of the open window as the cable car climbed. Midway up, a child sitting nearby wanted to stand by the window as well, but their parents told them it was dangerous - which got me to thinking "How? Leaning out a side window can be dangerous, but the back window isn't so low that someone might fall out, and even if you completely hang your head out the window in back, there's nothing to hit it." It's an old fault of mine - I like real reasons, not convenient and lazy lies.
The cable car goes through a tunnel, and then as it begins to climb more steeply, the lights of Tokyo appear from over the top of the mountain that the cable car just passed though. Many of the people in the car seemed to be taking it up the mountain for the first time - while I've done so... ten times? Fifteen times? I'm not sure, but in any case I'm familiar with the ride and exactly when it ends, so as it was coming to a stop, I grabbed my backpack and walked up to the front of the car so I'd been one of the first ones off. Once off, I skipped the (slightly expensive) beer garden and speed walked over to the free benches which still have a pretty decent view. I was pleased to see that one of them was open (on the far right, next to the pay-binoculars), so I sat there and took out the food and drink I'd bought on the way (at a grocery store back in central Tokyo), and put it on the table-like shelf in front of the benches. "Perfect" I thought....
Not long after I sat down, a group in their forties or fifties materialized to my right - and one of the men wanted to put Y100 in the pay-binoculars, but was dissuaded from doing so by someone in the group. I thought "Aw, come on, let the guy give it a try". I have spent my life seeing those pay-to-use binoculars, but have never actually used one (not that I can remember anyway), so I was sort of hoping to see one in action. Since the binoculars were right next to where I was sitting, the man seemed to notice my radio waves, and he looked over - seeing a foreigner, he asked me "Good view?", to which I answered "Tashikani" ("Indeed"), which produced a laugh from the group, which seemed to expect me to be a tourist. One of the men said "Yokeina koto wo shite..." to the man (not easy to translate, but something like "You should mind your own business"). They headed off, and a woman in the group turned around and said "Have a good time", to which I wordlessly nodded. She may have intended it to be friendly, but it didn't feel friendly and I took it to mean something like "You may have gotten one of our expressions right, but you are not one of us." [What's that sound I hear - groaning? Booing? You think I'm wildly imagining things? Whatever - you jump in a time machine, go to 1984 Tokyo, live here for 24 years, and then see if you still have the same opinion. I've met all kinds of people here over the past 24 years - and there are good and bad - just like everywhere in the world.]
After that, I tried to forget about the group who were young in Japan in the eighties, when it was more insular, more xenophobic, and more narrow minded than it is now. As I had some more wine & dried mangoes (I know - weird - but they actually go together for some reason), the happy sounds of a young couple (with the woman pregnant) sitting to my left drifted over and I got back into the mountain vibes....
Later on, the couple stood up, pulled out a camera and proceeded to take their own picture (at arm's length). I considered asked them if they'd like to take their picture, but stopped myself with "They're perfectly able to take their own picture". They took a flash picture, then another, and by their third picture, and with the answer in mind, I said (in Japanese) "You should turn the flash off" - which produced blank stares, so I realized they didn't know how. "Is that an Olympus?" The man continued looking at me, but the woman acknowledged that it was indeed an Olympus (it was her camera I guess), so I told them "It should have a circle of four buttons, with a button in the center of the circle. One of the four buttons should turn off the flash..." The woman found the button, got to the "No flash" symbol, and I said "Now, push the middle button..." which worked.
The setting changed, I asked them if they'd like me to take a picture - which they did, so they handed the camera over. The resulting picture showed the two of them in front of the lights of the city in the background (which the flash pictures didn't). I briefly explained that while the exposure was good, since the flash was off in such a dark place, the shutter speed was bound to be slow. I got them to expand the image a bit to see if it was sharp, or motion blurred. It seemed to be sharp, and they indicated that they liked it (expressing surprise at how bright the picture turned out without the flash). They said their (friendly) good-byes and headed off to the cable car.
I sat there and tried to piece it all together - the more relaxed young generation (with some dangerous hot-head exceptions) and the more up-tight older generation that I've spent 24 years here with (who tend to be more responsible than the current twenties people). Basically, it must just be a situation where some things get better and some things get worse. It's a blazingly-bright obvious concept, but still you expect things to get better without the good parts deteriorating, so it's an unpleasant surprise to discover the loss of an aspect to life that you thought was unshakably constant and solid....
After a while, I noticed a pair of twenties men (probably college students) explaining about camera ISO settings to a group of five twenties women. After the men left, I could hear one of the women asking what they were going on about, and another woman said "something about ISO this and that..." so I ended up (stupidly) jumping up and explaining that the numbers tied in with shutter speeds at f16 (what used to be the smallest aperture on most proper cameras), thus ISO 400 would basically mean 1/400 of a second shutter speed in bright sun at f16. They politely tolerated my lecture and then went on there way - joking that the night was full of camera education. I sat there and thought to myself, "What you did for the couple was good, but jumping up to explain the meaning of ISO settings to the group of five was really a dumb thing to do...".
By and by, I decided to go back down the mountain, so I got on the cable car and ended up talking with a man who was part of a group from the beer garden (on the roof of a building up behind where I was sitting). It was a friendly enough conversation, but he called me a "henna-gaijin" ("strange foreigner") apparently because I spoke Japanese. I used to get that from time-to-time (another eighties thing). If you were comfortable in the culture here and spoke the language, you were strange. If you didn't understand the language or culture, and you bumbled around expecting everyone you came in contact with to help you in English - well... that was a normal foreigner!
Back on a train speeding towards central Tokyo, I sat down and found myself in one of those on-a-stage situations that the bench seats against the windows facing each other generate. There was a group of about five men across from me who were interested in who was sitting across from them - so they were taking surreptitious looks. Not staring mind you, but the interest was in the air and I couldn't relax, so at the next station I casually moved over to another seat without an audience (late night trains headed towards Tokyo are not crowded and you can nearly always sit down - in contrast to the usual situation of always standing.
Back in the city... back to normal....
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Monday, August 25, 2008
"Hibarigaoka - a Typical Suburb of Tokyo" (August 1991)
One quiet August afternoon in Hibarigaoka, on the mid-western fringe of Tokyo, in suburbia, Lyle's camera flew of his bag, into his hands, and began recording....
It was a typical quiet afternoon - not what you might expect if you had only seen the same area in the morning frenzy of commuters rushing to the station to get to work on time.
In fact, this highlights a mystery of Japan - how people seem to have cast-iron ears at some times (shopkeepers shouting "Irasshaimase!" into customers' faces), and then are hyper-sensitive to noise at other times (a woman living next to a park complained to the city because she could hear the sound of small children playing in the park!).
In any case, the city is actually quite quiet - and certainly much more quiet than a lot of people seem to imagine it overseas.
Anyway - here's a view of August 1991 Tokyo suburbia:
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
It was a typical quiet afternoon - not what you might expect if you had only seen the same area in the morning frenzy of commuters rushing to the station to get to work on time.
In fact, this highlights a mystery of Japan - how people seem to have cast-iron ears at some times (shopkeepers shouting "Irasshaimase!" into customers' faces), and then are hyper-sensitive to noise at other times (a woman living next to a park complained to the city because she could hear the sound of small children playing in the park!).
In any case, the city is actually quite quiet - and certainly much more quiet than a lot of people seem to imagine it overseas.
Anyway - here's a view of August 1991 Tokyo suburbia:
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Sunday, August 17, 2008
"Walking the Streets of Ikebukuro in July 1991"
For someone who is sixteen; seventeen years ago is the far distant dark ages before the beginnings of time. For me, it's the other way around. It doesn't seem like enough has happened over the past seventeen years for things to have changed very much, so it keeps coming as a shock to me to notice how different my long-sleeping, recently revived video recordings from 1990-92 (digitized from analogue 8mm tape) look. Without dwelling on the changes too much (or maybe too much, we'll see), here is a description of my video clip (at YouTube) entitled '"Free Tissues, Crosswalks & a Speech" (July 1991)'.
Coming up one of the narrow stairs from the underground part of Ikebukuro Station, walking past a platoon of schoolgirls wearing "sailor" style school uniforms. This was before Japanese school uniforms became - in just a few years - mini-skirts (they had to be below the knee before), and the sailor style uniforms were considered to be the most stylish (and generally used by private schools, while public schools were more conservative).
The most striking part of this section of the clip for me, was the fact that I'm taking pictures while walking up public stairs. Two things have made this an overly dangerous thing to do. Cell phones & mini-skirts. There were several very public incidents of people with cell phones caught taking (or attempting to take) pictures up young women's skirts as they climbed stairs. Several things happened - among them; cell phone manufacturers made cell phone cameras so that they make a rather loud and obnoxious artificial shutter sound form the phone's speaker when a picture is taken; and there was a university professor caught, who was publicly and professionally ruined for his idiotic actions. So I never take any pictures while going up stairs any more (unless the whole flight of stairs is empty)! Best to be on the safe side.
The free packs of tissues (with advertising on the packs). Those haven't changed much. They still pass them out, and they still target certain people when passing them out. Most are for loan companies (or real estate companies) and - generally, not always - they will give them to anyone. The man who reluctantly handed over a pack I later saw very energetically passing them out to women. I don't remember exactly what it was - I have some other video I took of close-ups of tissue packs I'd been given - I'll try to find that and see what they were exactly.
Right where the over-amplified man giving a speech says "Ittai, Nippon wa do natte'ru daro?!" ("What in the world is happening to Japan?!"), I walk past a... monk(?) who is ringing a bell and awaiting donations. You used to see one of these guys pretty regularly, but it's become rather rare. I did see one in Shinjuku a few weeks ago.
Speaking of the over-amplified speech (coming from a loudspeaker truck parked in front of the station - not visible in the clip - with the shouting man standing on a platform built onto the roof), there used to be a lot of those, and they were generally right-wing people urging the country to move to the right. That you don't hear these people in public much these days may have something to do with things having gone to the right somewhat - just as they wanted - so maybe they see no need to make public displays now? I can't quite catch most of what the guy was saying, but there is the sentence very clearly heard that I mentioned in the preceding paragraph, and later on he's saying something about the military.
What else? Fashion and hairstyles I guess - mostly evident with the women. Oh yeah! Many people in 1991 in Japan actually had black hair! So many people (especially women) dye their hair now, that when you see someone with jet-black hair, it's actually striking! "Wow! Look at that! Actually black hair!" If you don't believe me, take a look at the dozens (hundreds maybe?) of shades of hair dye sold in drug stores, and then take a close look at the color of women's hair out in pubic. Another thing you didn't see in 1991, was men with plucked eyebrows and makeup. No comment on that one.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Coming up one of the narrow stairs from the underground part of Ikebukuro Station, walking past a platoon of schoolgirls wearing "sailor" style school uniforms. This was before Japanese school uniforms became - in just a few years - mini-skirts (they had to be below the knee before), and the sailor style uniforms were considered to be the most stylish (and generally used by private schools, while public schools were more conservative).
The most striking part of this section of the clip for me, was the fact that I'm taking pictures while walking up public stairs. Two things have made this an overly dangerous thing to do. Cell phones & mini-skirts. There were several very public incidents of people with cell phones caught taking (or attempting to take) pictures up young women's skirts as they climbed stairs. Several things happened - among them; cell phone manufacturers made cell phone cameras so that they make a rather loud and obnoxious artificial shutter sound form the phone's speaker when a picture is taken; and there was a university professor caught, who was publicly and professionally ruined for his idiotic actions. So I never take any pictures while going up stairs any more (unless the whole flight of stairs is empty)! Best to be on the safe side.
The free packs of tissues (with advertising on the packs). Those haven't changed much. They still pass them out, and they still target certain people when passing them out. Most are for loan companies (or real estate companies) and - generally, not always - they will give them to anyone. The man who reluctantly handed over a pack I later saw very energetically passing them out to women. I don't remember exactly what it was - I have some other video I took of close-ups of tissue packs I'd been given - I'll try to find that and see what they were exactly.
Right where the over-amplified man giving a speech says "Ittai, Nippon wa do natte'ru daro?!" ("What in the world is happening to Japan?!"), I walk past a... monk(?) who is ringing a bell and awaiting donations. You used to see one of these guys pretty regularly, but it's become rather rare. I did see one in Shinjuku a few weeks ago.
Speaking of the over-amplified speech (coming from a loudspeaker truck parked in front of the station - not visible in the clip - with the shouting man standing on a platform built onto the roof), there used to be a lot of those, and they were generally right-wing people urging the country to move to the right. That you don't hear these people in public much these days may have something to do with things having gone to the right somewhat - just as they wanted - so maybe they see no need to make public displays now? I can't quite catch most of what the guy was saying, but there is the sentence very clearly heard that I mentioned in the preceding paragraph, and later on he's saying something about the military.
What else? Fashion and hairstyles I guess - mostly evident with the women. Oh yeah! Many people in 1991 in Japan actually had black hair! So many people (especially women) dye their hair now, that when you see someone with jet-black hair, it's actually striking! "Wow! Look at that! Actually black hair!" If you don't believe me, take a look at the dozens (hundreds maybe?) of shades of hair dye sold in drug stores, and then take a close look at the color of women's hair out in pubic. Another thing you didn't see in 1991, was men with plucked eyebrows and makeup. No comment on that one.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Saturday, August 16, 2008
"Hiroshima - Before 1945, In 1945, and in 2007"
Way back last year, I posted a story about my trip to Hiroshima, and someone asked if there were pictures. I replied that I was working on it and would post something later. So - here is my new page of photos and text about Hiroshima:
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/PhotoGlryMain/pgc/Hiroshima01a.html
I used (with slight editing) some blocks of text from my post a year ago, but also wrote new text to go with the photos. Writing about historical is time-consuming! I spent a lot of time looking into things and still feel like I would like to spend more time researching this - but it's not my goal in life to be a specialist on Hiroshima, so I'm calling it a wrap.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/PhotoGlryMain/pgc/Hiroshima01a.html
I used (with slight editing) some blocks of text from my post a year ago, but also wrote new text to go with the photos. Writing about historical is time-consuming! I spent a lot of time looking into things and still feel like I would like to spend more time researching this - but it's not my goal in life to be a specialist on Hiroshima, so I'm calling it a wrap.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Saturday, August 09, 2008
"Casual World? (Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremonies)"
I just got through watching the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics (about three hours worth). They were pretty interesting... with lots of fireworks and cultural scenes, music, etc. And then the athletes were introduced at the stadium. It was the usual deal with them parading out in different uniforms/costumes, and waving to the crowd. I was watching absentmindedly when I noticed that one of the athletes was videotaping the stadium with their left hand while waving with their right! And then there was another - and another! Some countries' athletes looked more like camera crews than athletes! In other groups, there was not a camera to be seen. And... what's this? A cell phone! "Look at that! That athlete is walking along like he's in the park, having a conversation on his cell phone! - Hee-hee!" Another athlete came out with a big single lens reflex camera, pausing to focus on things and take pictures! Ha-ha! So much for solemn ceremonies!
And then there were the crowd scenes! As expected, they focused on world criminals... er... leaders... from various countries as "their" athletes walked by, but then there was a large man who stood up, the camera zoomed in on him, and he adjusted his trousers up higher - probably not imagining that he was doing so on countless screens around the world! Another group the camera focused on looked blankly back at the camera, and there was the boy who looked like the long ceremony was almost more than he could bear as his parents got him to (reluctantly) wave for the camera, etc.
So - my first impression was that the world has become loose and sloppy. Partly this seems like a good thing - why not relax? I like taking pictures and I probably would have liked to take a camera out there myself if I had been in their place. But... there's something disconcerting about everyone taking pictures of everything all the time.
Also possibly worth pondering, is regarding the lingering camera close ups on athletes talking on their cell phones, or walking staring into their camera's viewscreen (which most didn't do actually - they just blindly aimed it while looking up at the crowd), makes me wonder a little at whoever was in charge of choosing which camera images to use during the live broadcast, and also at the camera operators who zoomed their cameras in on some of those scenes. Maybe that's what you get with a live broadcast if you put it together with so many cameras? It's no big issue - I had just thought that the opening ceremony would be slightly more formal than that, and that the camera operators would have chosen a different aspect to emphasize. (You don't suppose they're trying to show the world what a relaxed and fun place Beijing is?).
Another thing that occurred to me is that we'll probably be seeing a lot of those personally taken videos on YouTube! Some will be really hard to watch - with the screen at an angle and bouncing up and down.
Well, it's late.
Sore dewa!
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
And then there were the crowd scenes! As expected, they focused on world criminals... er... leaders... from various countries as "their" athletes walked by, but then there was a large man who stood up, the camera zoomed in on him, and he adjusted his trousers up higher - probably not imagining that he was doing so on countless screens around the world! Another group the camera focused on looked blankly back at the camera, and there was the boy who looked like the long ceremony was almost more than he could bear as his parents got him to (reluctantly) wave for the camera, etc.
So - my first impression was that the world has become loose and sloppy. Partly this seems like a good thing - why not relax? I like taking pictures and I probably would have liked to take a camera out there myself if I had been in their place. But... there's something disconcerting about everyone taking pictures of everything all the time.
Also possibly worth pondering, is regarding the lingering camera close ups on athletes talking on their cell phones, or walking staring into their camera's viewscreen (which most didn't do actually - they just blindly aimed it while looking up at the crowd), makes me wonder a little at whoever was in charge of choosing which camera images to use during the live broadcast, and also at the camera operators who zoomed their cameras in on some of those scenes. Maybe that's what you get with a live broadcast if you put it together with so many cameras? It's no big issue - I had just thought that the opening ceremony would be slightly more formal than that, and that the camera operators would have chosen a different aspect to emphasize. (You don't suppose they're trying to show the world what a relaxed and fun place Beijing is?).
Another thing that occurred to me is that we'll probably be seeing a lot of those personally taken videos on YouTube! Some will be really hard to watch - with the screen at an angle and bouncing up and down.
Well, it's late.
Sore dewa!
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Thursday, August 07, 2008
"Defective Learning In - Bad Actions Out"
Watching yet another Nintendo Wii advertisement on the train this morning (one of the two over-door displays runs soundless TV advertising - along with made-for-the-train ads), I contemplated scenes of people standing on a board, playing virtual soccer, walking a virtual tightrope, balancing virtual this or virtual that - and it occurred to me that people are basically giving their bodies & minds defective programming. Standing on a board that is very nearly motionless, they watch a screen showing a soccer ball come zooming in - which they virtually hit by moving their head as though they are knocking it back out onto the field on the screen (no impact, no pain); or virtually ski or perform virtual balancing acts, watching the screen indicating steep angles (while their feet are in fact resolutely parallel to the firm floor of their living room); etc. etc.
Great fun, sure. But what happens to people over time when they have ever less interaction with the physical world and ever more interaction with a heavily flawed virtual world? If kids are on a swing set, they learn what happens when they jump off of a moving swing - how far up they go, how far out, how hard down (Gravity-101). If they climb on a jungle gym, they learn how much time they have to grab a bar if they begin to fall. They learn the pain of hitting their heads on actual steel bars (hopefully not hard enough to be actually dangerous), and they learn a whole range of physical facts related to motion and balance. All real and applicable to other physical things in the world.
Another example of defective learning so obvious, that it is simultaneously laughed off and underestimated - TV & movies. I hadn't thought about this for most things, but a couple of events prompted me to give the concept some serious thought. First there was the incident at Shin-Otsuka Station some ten to fifteen years ago in which a drunk man fell off the platform. A train was approaching the platform and there was no time to do anything, but a man jumped down to help the man who fell, and another man (a friend of the second man) also jumped down. There wasn't time to get out of the way of the train, and all three men were killed under its wheels.
While it's admirable that they wanted to help the man who fell, you have to wonder if they would have committed suicide with him if they had known there was no possibility - even remote - of actually saving him. I have grown up seeing movies in which people are remarkably saved from being hit by a speeding train/truck/bus/car/skateboard/explosion(!)/bullets(!) at the last possible moment. Sometimes it's clear that with the speed of the train/car/bus, whatever, the person would be dead - 100% dead. But no! Rejoice movie viewers! For the laws of physics have been suspended once again, and our hero is saved!
Aside from the fact that I very greatly detest that sort of dishonest trick in movie-making (how much happier the audience is to discover the hero alive after having given them up for dead), after seeing that for two or three or four decades, what sort of answer does your brain throw back at you when you suddenly find yourself in a similar situation, when you need to make a microsecond decision about what to do - as the man who jumped down to save the other guy did? In his case, his brain - in pre-thinking automatic mode no doubt - went with Hollywood screenwriting, and now he's dead. Who knows, maybe the guy had never seen a TV program or movie in his life (coming from a modern society, there's a very slim chance of that), or maybe he would have done it anyway, but you have to wonder.
There was a news story about a man in a parking garage who saw a couple of car thieves beginning to drive off in his car. What to do, what to do.... But of course! Jump on the hood! It always works in the movies! "But wait... these criminals don't look upset that I'm on the outside of the car, looking through the windshield at them... they're laughing at me! Speeding up! Turning on the windshield wipers and washers! Laughing! Swerving and speeding up still more! Oh no...." And the guy ended up pleading for his life - telling them they could keep the car, but please let him live!
There was a hijacking in Japan something like fifteen years ago, in which a man who had spent long hours virtually flying a game airplane took the controls of a 747. The pilot tried to get him to make the necessary actions to keep the plane in the air, so the idiot with the virtual brain and real knife, stabbed the pilot to death and kept on operating the real plane the way he had learned to fly the virtual plane (which was too slow to actually keep a real 747 in the air). Fortunately, there were two off-duty pilots on board who realized that the plane was on the verge of stalling and falling from the sky, so they forcefully broke into the cockpit and wrestled the real idiot with the virtual brain away from the controls, and then flew the plane as it needed to be flown - saving the whole planeload of passengers and crew from certain death (except the murdered pilot).
From live news shows - in helicopter views of real car chases in which someone is trying to speed away from the police in Los Angeles, I've seen several where the car tries speeding straight through a red light and then hits a car in the intersection. Could the adrenaline decision to speed through the red light be influenced by a lifetime of watching heroes speeding through red lights in the movies (and miraculously just making it, while the pursuer doesn't)?
Admittedly, those are mostly extreme circumstances, but my point is that with ever more virtual reality exposure, people are going to be making ever more misinformed and bad decisions, performing sloppy actions that work on electronic sensors in games/machines but don't fly in the real world. Perception is reality? No. Reality is reality. Some reality bites and some doesn't, but what's real is still real, even if people don't realize it.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Great fun, sure. But what happens to people over time when they have ever less interaction with the physical world and ever more interaction with a heavily flawed virtual world? If kids are on a swing set, they learn what happens when they jump off of a moving swing - how far up they go, how far out, how hard down (Gravity-101). If they climb on a jungle gym, they learn how much time they have to grab a bar if they begin to fall. They learn the pain of hitting their heads on actual steel bars (hopefully not hard enough to be actually dangerous), and they learn a whole range of physical facts related to motion and balance. All real and applicable to other physical things in the world.
Another example of defective learning so obvious, that it is simultaneously laughed off and underestimated - TV & movies. I hadn't thought about this for most things, but a couple of events prompted me to give the concept some serious thought. First there was the incident at Shin-Otsuka Station some ten to fifteen years ago in which a drunk man fell off the platform. A train was approaching the platform and there was no time to do anything, but a man jumped down to help the man who fell, and another man (a friend of the second man) also jumped down. There wasn't time to get out of the way of the train, and all three men were killed under its wheels.
While it's admirable that they wanted to help the man who fell, you have to wonder if they would have committed suicide with him if they had known there was no possibility - even remote - of actually saving him. I have grown up seeing movies in which people are remarkably saved from being hit by a speeding train/truck/bus/car/skateboard/explosion(!)/bullets(!) at the last possible moment. Sometimes it's clear that with the speed of the train/car/bus, whatever, the person would be dead - 100% dead. But no! Rejoice movie viewers! For the laws of physics have been suspended once again, and our hero is saved!
Aside from the fact that I very greatly detest that sort of dishonest trick in movie-making (how much happier the audience is to discover the hero alive after having given them up for dead), after seeing that for two or three or four decades, what sort of answer does your brain throw back at you when you suddenly find yourself in a similar situation, when you need to make a microsecond decision about what to do - as the man who jumped down to save the other guy did? In his case, his brain - in pre-thinking automatic mode no doubt - went with Hollywood screenwriting, and now he's dead. Who knows, maybe the guy had never seen a TV program or movie in his life (coming from a modern society, there's a very slim chance of that), or maybe he would have done it anyway, but you have to wonder.
There was a news story about a man in a parking garage who saw a couple of car thieves beginning to drive off in his car. What to do, what to do.... But of course! Jump on the hood! It always works in the movies! "But wait... these criminals don't look upset that I'm on the outside of the car, looking through the windshield at them... they're laughing at me! Speeding up! Turning on the windshield wipers and washers! Laughing! Swerving and speeding up still more! Oh no...." And the guy ended up pleading for his life - telling them they could keep the car, but please let him live!
There was a hijacking in Japan something like fifteen years ago, in which a man who had spent long hours virtually flying a game airplane took the controls of a 747. The pilot tried to get him to make the necessary actions to keep the plane in the air, so the idiot with the virtual brain and real knife, stabbed the pilot to death and kept on operating the real plane the way he had learned to fly the virtual plane (which was too slow to actually keep a real 747 in the air). Fortunately, there were two off-duty pilots on board who realized that the plane was on the verge of stalling and falling from the sky, so they forcefully broke into the cockpit and wrestled the real idiot with the virtual brain away from the controls, and then flew the plane as it needed to be flown - saving the whole planeload of passengers and crew from certain death (except the murdered pilot).
From live news shows - in helicopter views of real car chases in which someone is trying to speed away from the police in Los Angeles, I've seen several where the car tries speeding straight through a red light and then hits a car in the intersection. Could the adrenaline decision to speed through the red light be influenced by a lifetime of watching heroes speeding through red lights in the movies (and miraculously just making it, while the pursuer doesn't)?
Admittedly, those are mostly extreme circumstances, but my point is that with ever more virtual reality exposure, people are going to be making ever more misinformed and bad decisions, performing sloppy actions that work on electronic sensors in games/machines but don't fly in the real world. Perception is reality? No. Reality is reality. Some reality bites and some doesn't, but what's real is still real, even if people don't realize it.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Monday, August 04, 2008
"The Shinkansen Super Express Trains"
The Shinkansen train system in Japan - for a long time, known only as "the bullet train" - is finally beginning to be known by it's proper name "Shinkansen". The name itself is better sounding than it's translation - "new main/trunk line". (Even in Japanese, "Shinkansen" conjures up images of the train, not the mundane component parts of the name.) Initially, the "bullet train" name made some sense, as the first version of the train looked like a bullet at the front, and was fast like a "speeding bullet" (in comparison to other trains).
I bring this up, because I posted a video at YouTube of one of the original type Shinkansen trains pulling into Tokyo Station in 1991, and then one of the newer (at the time) Shinkansen trains leaving the station. The video also takes a quick walk inside one of the old type train cars and looks into the cab:
And this page has some pictures and information about the current Shinkansen train system:
http://www.japanrail.com/JR_shinkansen.html
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
I bring this up, because I posted a video at YouTube of one of the original type Shinkansen trains pulling into Tokyo Station in 1991, and then one of the newer (at the time) Shinkansen trains leaving the station. The video also takes a quick walk inside one of the old type train cars and looks into the cab:
And this page has some pictures and information about the current Shinkansen train system:
http://www.japanrail.com/JR_shinkansen.html
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Monday, July 28, 2008
"Ebisu Station - 1991 & 2008"
My first job in Japan, back in 1984, was at a company that had a small office in Ebisu. I have fairly vivid memories of walking down the street on my way to the company (strangely, not going back to the station - I suppose the fact that it was more difficult to find the company than the station produced increased concentration and thus stronger memories), and walking up the stairs in an old building to the company, but no memories of Ebisu Station itself (before it was modernized) that I can recall. And so it was a bit of a shock to see it (from the Yamanote Line) in one of my old videos from 1991:
Ebisu is a modern and fashionable place/station now, with two double-sided platforms at which several different train lines stop. There is a department store built over the station, so entering the station (in a train) is a bit like going into a tunnel. Contrast that with 1991, when it was just a single open-air platform, and it's hard to see the pictures of the open-air platform and draw any kind of mental connection with how it is now! I was there! I took the video! I used the station! And I still can't recognize the old images as "Ebisu Station". But it makes sense... the open-air type platforms were all about the same - so each particular one doesn't/didn't have much in the way of anything distinct to remember. (Current Shin-Okubo Station is about the same design of the former Ebisu Station, if someone would like to know how it was on the inside.)
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Ebisu is a modern and fashionable place/station now, with two double-sided platforms at which several different train lines stop. There is a department store built over the station, so entering the station (in a train) is a bit like going into a tunnel. Contrast that with 1991, when it was just a single open-air platform, and it's hard to see the pictures of the open-air platform and draw any kind of mental connection with how it is now! I was there! I took the video! I used the station! And I still can't recognize the old images as "Ebisu Station". But it makes sense... the open-air type platforms were all about the same - so each particular one doesn't/didn't have much in the way of anything distinct to remember. (Current Shin-Okubo Station is about the same design of the former Ebisu Station, if someone would like to know how it was on the inside.)
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Monday, July 21, 2008
"Tokyo Morning Trains (February 1991)"
My most recent post to YouTube is a video composed of many clips taken one morning between about 5:30 a.m. and 7:50 a.m., starting with the Yamanote Line in Shibuya, and then going up to Ikebukuro, where I changed to the Seibu-Ikebukuro Line and rode out to Tokorozawa (by mistake - I fell asleep on the train), and then back to Hibarigaoka, then to Shakujikoen, and finally back to Hibarigaoka.
This video picks up exactly where "night before The Train" leaves off (I'll put links to both below), and includes short clips from "Shakujikoen Sardine Run" and "Actually Full Train in 1991 (Why Flex-Time is a Good Idea)". New are several scenes of other express trains loading in Shakujikoen, as well as not so crowded trains going away from central Tokyo, and station scenes at Ikebukuro, Tokorozawa, Shakujikoen, and Hibarigaoka.
"Morning Tokyo Trains in 1991" (2 of 2)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=53cgj-FJQhg
"night before The Train" (1 of 2)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZISXHGXIAyc
The video is a jumble of images, but keep in mind that all the images are chronological and all the images were taken on the same morning. So the images of one crowded train after another loading & leaving in Shakujikoen are not a compilation from different days, but rather just one train after another leaving on the same morning. The progression from most people sitting down at 6:30 a.m. (from Tokorozawa anyway, not from Hibarigaoka!) to some people not being able to force themselves onto the train between around 7:15 - 7:45 a.m. (from Hibarigaoka & Shakujikoen) can give you some idea of how the crush-rush morning commute works.
The unfortunate thing about the "Actually Full Train in 1991 (Why Flex-Time is a Good Idea)" video (that has been copied and reposted under various titles dozens of times over, and seen by something like three million people AFAIK), is that people with no idea how the Tokyo train system is, seem to have actually come to the conclusion that all the trains in Japan - all the time - are like that. Obviously (I would have thought anyway!), this is not the case, but maybe seeing other trains from the same morning can set some people's mistaken mental image of Tokyo's trains straight(er)....
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
This video picks up exactly where "night before The Train" leaves off (I'll put links to both below), and includes short clips from "Shakujikoen Sardine Run" and "Actually Full Train in 1991 (Why Flex-Time is a Good Idea)". New are several scenes of other express trains loading in Shakujikoen, as well as not so crowded trains going away from central Tokyo, and station scenes at Ikebukuro, Tokorozawa, Shakujikoen, and Hibarigaoka.
"Morning Tokyo Trains in 1991" (2 of 2)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=53cgj-FJQhg
"night before The Train" (1 of 2)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZISXHGXIAyc
The video is a jumble of images, but keep in mind that all the images are chronological and all the images were taken on the same morning. So the images of one crowded train after another loading & leaving in Shakujikoen are not a compilation from different days, but rather just one train after another leaving on the same morning. The progression from most people sitting down at 6:30 a.m. (from Tokorozawa anyway, not from Hibarigaoka!) to some people not being able to force themselves onto the train between around 7:15 - 7:45 a.m. (from Hibarigaoka & Shakujikoen) can give you some idea of how the crush-rush morning commute works.
The unfortunate thing about the "Actually Full Train in 1991 (Why Flex-Time is a Good Idea)" video (that has been copied and reposted under various titles dozens of times over, and seen by something like three million people AFAIK), is that people with no idea how the Tokyo train system is, seem to have actually come to the conclusion that all the trains in Japan - all the time - are like that. Obviously (I would have thought anyway!), this is not the case, but maybe seeing other trains from the same morning can set some people's mistaken mental image of Tokyo's trains straight(er)....
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Friday, July 18, 2008
"Manga Beyond the Peak in Japan?"
There have been some reports in Japan concerning falling sales for the weekly manga magazines, with interviews with long-time readers who say they think the quality has dropped, causing them to lose interest in the publications. What with the time lag in local trends crossing oceans, maybe a decline in manga popularity in the rest of the world is in the pipeline. I'm no expert in manga and anime, but from what I've personally seen, I would tend to agree that a lot of the new stuff isn't as interesting as many of the older series were/are. Over the years, I've really enjoyed reading some manga series (in Japanese in order to learn Japanese), but I haven't found much that I'm interested in lately.
Aside from quality, I think manga has reached a saturation point in Japan. I remember about 15-18 years ago, when historical manga books were becoming popular, there were some concerned voices over the young people who were learning shallow history from easy-to-read manga and not reading proper books that presented history in any depth. History is never completely understood by anyone, and nearly always greatly misunderstood by everyone, but even so, worry over that shallow way of learning history may have been valid - many current twenty-something people (they don't quite know it yet, but they will-not & can-not stay there!) don't seem to be very knowledgeable about the basic facts of even fairly recent history).
For a while, it seemed like there were manga everywhere in Japan, and then manga began to be popular outside of Japan. Just about the time it was looking like there was no end to the growth in popularity of Japanesee manga, I think they have become a bit of a standard production thing, and creativity seems to be lagging. One exception seems to be "One Piece" which has some pretty creative story lines and has been (and continues to be) very popular, although the newest episodes of the animated version of that have become really bad - I don't know why that is exactly - one theory being that they had some catching up to do initially when the anime kicked in later than the manga, but now they're caught up, there isn't enough original manga material to fill up a 30-minute animation, so they put in meaningless filler in order to bring the show up to 30 minutes (with many commercials and a long intro and exit, more like 15 minutes actually). Whatever the reason, many of the latest animated versions of One Piece aren't worth watching).
One type of manga that seems to be selling well, are manga-novels, which people are reading at home I suppose - as you don't see much of them on the trains... which brings up another reason for the decline of the weekly manga magazines - cell phones! Before cell phones took over people's lives (text-messaging & games), magazines of all types were popularly bought from train station newstands to pass the time in the train reading. These days, when people aren't text messaging with their cell phones on the train (which they nearly always are - especially the early-twenties crowd, who I swear must be doing it even when they sleep), or sleeping (for the lucky few who get seats), I've seen more A-6 text-only paperback books in hand lately than comic books. The advantage of a text-only A6 paperback book, is that it's thin enough to easily fit into a pocket or bag, so they can be carried for a week or two or three. The small phone book sized thick magazines used to be bought for a single journey's worth of reading (usually on the homeward-bound evening trains), and then tossed up onto the overhead racks before getting off the train (to be picked up by someone else to read), but I hardly ever see that any more. (Since we entered the Age of Unknown Danger, railways have asked people not to leave things on the overhead racks like that, but I don't see many people reading them in the first place anyway.)
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Aside from quality, I think manga has reached a saturation point in Japan. I remember about 15-18 years ago, when historical manga books were becoming popular, there were some concerned voices over the young people who were learning shallow history from easy-to-read manga and not reading proper books that presented history in any depth. History is never completely understood by anyone, and nearly always greatly misunderstood by everyone, but even so, worry over that shallow way of learning history may have been valid - many current twenty-something people (they don't quite know it yet, but they will-not & can-not stay there!) don't seem to be very knowledgeable about the basic facts of even fairly recent history).
For a while, it seemed like there were manga everywhere in Japan, and then manga began to be popular outside of Japan. Just about the time it was looking like there was no end to the growth in popularity of Japanesee manga, I think they have become a bit of a standard production thing, and creativity seems to be lagging. One exception seems to be "One Piece" which has some pretty creative story lines and has been (and continues to be) very popular, although the newest episodes of the animated version of that have become really bad - I don't know why that is exactly - one theory being that they had some catching up to do initially when the anime kicked in later than the manga, but now they're caught up, there isn't enough original manga material to fill up a 30-minute animation, so they put in meaningless filler in order to bring the show up to 30 minutes (with many commercials and a long intro and exit, more like 15 minutes actually). Whatever the reason, many of the latest animated versions of One Piece aren't worth watching).
One type of manga that seems to be selling well, are manga-novels, which people are reading at home I suppose - as you don't see much of them on the trains... which brings up another reason for the decline of the weekly manga magazines - cell phones! Before cell phones took over people's lives (text-messaging & games), magazines of all types were popularly bought from train station newstands to pass the time in the train reading. These days, when people aren't text messaging with their cell phones on the train (which they nearly always are - especially the early-twenties crowd, who I swear must be doing it even when they sleep), or sleeping (for the lucky few who get seats), I've seen more A-6 text-only paperback books in hand lately than comic books. The advantage of a text-only A6 paperback book, is that it's thin enough to easily fit into a pocket or bag, so they can be carried for a week or two or three. The small phone book sized thick magazines used to be bought for a single journey's worth of reading (usually on the homeward-bound evening trains), and then tossed up onto the overhead racks before getting off the train (to be picked up by someone else to read), but I hardly ever see that any more. (Since we entered the Age of Unknown Danger, railways have asked people not to leave things on the overhead racks like that, but I don't see many people reading them in the first place anyway.)
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Monday, July 14, 2008
"Visiting the Past..."
On Friday, after walking from Shinbashi Station up through Ginza and over to Yurakucho, I stopped by a "stand-bar" (cheap place to buy suds, where you stand - sometimes on the sidewalk - while you drink, thus "stand" bar) near Yurakucho Station, had a drink, and - looking at the old brickwork of the elevated railbed - pondered someone putting those bricks in place, one at a time. Then, looking down the street, I thought of stories an e-pal has written about the times he spent in Yurakucho, Ginza, and Hibiya Park in 1948-51. Maybe the bricks soaked up some of those times, because it almost seemed as though I could - realizing the brick-faced overhead railbed was the same as at that time - see him and the people of that time walking by in the distance - crossing under the railbed when going to and from Hibiya Park and Ginza.
The next step in that line of thinking was (naturally) a time machine, so I could actually go back and walk around in that era. And here I ran into turbulence. Supposing you really could go back to another era - you would have to have period clothes ready before crossing the time bridge, and you'd have to assume some sort of period identity. Someone asks you who you are, and you might have to actually be someone other than a time traveler, which would spoil the fun:
"What? Another time traveler huh? Well look here bud, this here is our time, and we don't appreciate you future time tourists coming here and treating us like funny animals in a zoo! Go back to where you came from, and stay out of the past! You don't belong here!".
The main attraction to going back, after all, would be to find out first hand exactly how it felt to live in that era, so being a part of the past - even for just a few hours - would be important.
And that's about where I was on Friday, when some people from a group also drinking at the stand-bar began to talk to me, and I shifted gears and re-entered the 21 century.
The flow of time has been on my mind since last Wednesday actually, when I attended a retirement party for a man who joined the company I work at in 1969. That was part of what got me going on the past on Friday, and then over the weekend I watched a color newsreel from... 1944 I think, that showed life aboard an aircraft carrier (with the title "Fighting Lady", if I remember correctly). The young men in the film seemed pretty much the same as the young men I remember from my school days. Maybe adjusting to the past wouldn't be so difficult after all. No Internet though....
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
The next step in that line of thinking was (naturally) a time machine, so I could actually go back and walk around in that era. And here I ran into turbulence. Supposing you really could go back to another era - you would have to have period clothes ready before crossing the time bridge, and you'd have to assume some sort of period identity. Someone asks you who you are, and you might have to actually be someone other than a time traveler, which would spoil the fun:
"What? Another time traveler huh? Well look here bud, this here is our time, and we don't appreciate you future time tourists coming here and treating us like funny animals in a zoo! Go back to where you came from, and stay out of the past! You don't belong here!".
The main attraction to going back, after all, would be to find out first hand exactly how it felt to live in that era, so being a part of the past - even for just a few hours - would be important.
And that's about where I was on Friday, when some people from a group also drinking at the stand-bar began to talk to me, and I shifted gears and re-entered the 21 century.
The flow of time has been on my mind since last Wednesday actually, when I attended a retirement party for a man who joined the company I work at in 1969. That was part of what got me going on the past on Friday, and then over the weekend I watched a color newsreel from... 1944 I think, that showed life aboard an aircraft carrier (with the title "Fighting Lady", if I remember correctly). The young men in the film seemed pretty much the same as the young men I remember from my school days. Maybe adjusting to the past wouldn't be so difficult after all. No Internet though....
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Friday, July 11, 2008
"Not as Bad, and Worse"
Just when I tell people that the crush-rush commuter trains here are not as bad as they appear in a video I took in 1991 - "Actually Full Train in 1991 (Why Flex-Time is a Good Idea)" - I take my usual set of trains to work today and am reminded of the bad aspects to rail travel as a sardine. It's not the crowding exactly that is unpleasant, but rather when you get stuck next to an unpleasant individual. An a sardine in a fully packed train, you can't do anything other than stand there and wait for the train to reach a station. Well... to be more precise, you can't do anything in the way of moving to another part of the train, but there are little wars going on beneath the surface, with actions, reactions, subtle attacks, revenge moves, etc. etc. These take the form of stepping on feet, elbows in backs, arms strategically located to protect sides from other's elbows, "accidentally" stepping on a foot of a foot-stomper in retaliation, turning to face someone who has been poking you in the back with a paperback book, standing your ground (by holding on to an overhead bar) against someone pushing into you without good cause (some people will have empty space in front of them, and they *still* lean back against a group of people uncomfortably packed together), and.... many many more things that are very real to sardine-run commuters, but unseen by a casual observer, and completely off the radar screen of people in a car culture seeing a crowd of people smashing themselves onto a train, who have never experienced it.
Most of the time, most people are quite civil with each other on the trains here (as they should be - it would be chaos if they weren't!), but there are some very unpleasant people out there (as you might imagine - they're everywhere after all!), and they are the primary reason that riding the rails to work can be a very unpleasant experience. What's the latest in unpleasantness? Early twenties males who get in front of everyone and walk at a snail's pace - proving how big and tough they are - "I'm not going to hurry, and I'm going to slow you down and make you late to work - HaHaHa!". A certain percentage of early-twenties males in every society are brain-dead neanderthals - they should be forbidden from riding public transport.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Most of the time, most people are quite civil with each other on the trains here (as they should be - it would be chaos if they weren't!), but there are some very unpleasant people out there (as you might imagine - they're everywhere after all!), and they are the primary reason that riding the rails to work can be a very unpleasant experience. What's the latest in unpleasantness? Early twenties males who get in front of everyone and walk at a snail's pace - proving how big and tough they are - "I'm not going to hurry, and I'm going to slow you down and make you late to work - HaHaHa!". A certain percentage of early-twenties males in every society are brain-dead neanderthals - they should be forbidden from riding public transport.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Thursday, July 10, 2008
"Train & Lifestyle Perceptions"
Groan... no - not more text about the Tokyo sardine run trains!?! Well... it's an ongoing issue! The comments section of some of the copy postings have thousands of responses and some of them are worth taking a look at (if not for their content, then for what they suggest about culture, or lack thereof).
Responses to views of sardine-run commuter train conditions in Tokyo vary drastically, but there are two main categories, which correlate with the vantage point of the viewer: 1) Mega-City dwellers, who typically say something along the lines of "Ah, that's nothing! My city's trains are more crowded than that!" (which they tend not to say for the "Actually Full Train in 1991 (Why Flex-Time is a Good Idea" video) BTW, and 2) Car Culture city dwellers who are horrified by it and either say "That's got to be fake!" or "You've got to be kidding!", or "After ten minutes in there, people will be dying from lack of air!", etc. (I rode trains like that for many years, and lack of air wasn't an issue - heat in the winter was though, with the windows closed, it would sometimes get to be very hot in there.)
It's interesting to me how it becomes a badge of honor for Mega-City dwellers to brag about how crowded their trains are ("I'm strong enough to endure this! Ho-ho!"?), and how horrified non-train riders are, sounding as though they have just viewed something unimaginatively horrible from the fringe of the universe - not something any human is likely to be able to endure for long without dropping over dead.
And - overall - I've been disappointed & shocked at the lack of any evidence of effort to understand what the pictures are, and what they mean, not to mention the racist and nationalistic insults that people post. Who are these people who blithely insult people and cultures they know nothing about? I'm hoping they're middle-school students, because if they're adults, then this world is in some serious trouble, with too many of the human race having retrogressed into idiotdom.
And... something else... what was it? ........ Hmmmmm..... there was something else I wanted/needed to say.....
I can't remember what it was, but there's something else I've noticed. There is endless speculation about the video, where it was taken (Japan? China?), whether it's real or fake ("It's fake!", "It's real!"), what it must be like inside the train, etc. etc., and no one seems to consider the concept that someone took the video and that person not only took the video, but rode that train line and trains just as crowded as that one for more than a decade. That person is me, and I'm still shaking my head about the idiotic comments I see and the claims I see for it. I KNOW what's what with that video, but it seems to be very difficult to get the truth out.
Traffic jams versus people jams.
In a traffic jam, you've got your personal space, but you don't have any kind of dependable time-line for exactly how long it will take you to get to work. More cars on the road means slower speeds and increased waiting at lights, etc. There is some variation to train travel as well (not so much in Tokyo usually), but whether a train is empty or is completely packed, it travels down the rails at the same speed. So, while it's not fun being smashed in together with a bunch of strangers, the crowded conditions don't actually slow you down. It's less pleasant than an empty train, but still speedy!
So, to sum up - I think Tokyo's trains are probably more crowded than the trains in New York and London (that depends on the line of course - there are many train lines in Tokyo, some more crowded than others), and for people who find the "Actually Full Train in 1991 (Why Flex-Time is a Good Idea" shocking - I can report that it's not as bad as it looks. And I know what I'm talking about - I've spent many years riding trains like that.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Responses to views of sardine-run commuter train conditions in Tokyo vary drastically, but there are two main categories, which correlate with the vantage point of the viewer: 1) Mega-City dwellers, who typically say something along the lines of "Ah, that's nothing! My city's trains are more crowded than that!" (which they tend not to say for the "Actually Full Train in 1991 (Why Flex-Time is a Good Idea" video) BTW, and 2) Car Culture city dwellers who are horrified by it and either say "That's got to be fake!" or "You've got to be kidding!", or "After ten minutes in there, people will be dying from lack of air!", etc. (I rode trains like that for many years, and lack of air wasn't an issue - heat in the winter was though, with the windows closed, it would sometimes get to be very hot in there.)
It's interesting to me how it becomes a badge of honor for Mega-City dwellers to brag about how crowded their trains are ("I'm strong enough to endure this! Ho-ho!"?), and how horrified non-train riders are, sounding as though they have just viewed something unimaginatively horrible from the fringe of the universe - not something any human is likely to be able to endure for long without dropping over dead.
And - overall - I've been disappointed & shocked at the lack of any evidence of effort to understand what the pictures are, and what they mean, not to mention the racist and nationalistic insults that people post. Who are these people who blithely insult people and cultures they know nothing about? I'm hoping they're middle-school students, because if they're adults, then this world is in some serious trouble, with too many of the human race having retrogressed into idiotdom.
And... something else... what was it? ........ Hmmmmm..... there was something else I wanted/needed to say.....
I can't remember what it was, but there's something else I've noticed. There is endless speculation about the video, where it was taken (Japan? China?), whether it's real or fake ("It's fake!", "It's real!"), what it must be like inside the train, etc. etc., and no one seems to consider the concept that someone took the video and that person not only took the video, but rode that train line and trains just as crowded as that one for more than a decade. That person is me, and I'm still shaking my head about the idiotic comments I see and the claims I see for it. I KNOW what's what with that video, but it seems to be very difficult to get the truth out.
Traffic jams versus people jams.
In a traffic jam, you've got your personal space, but you don't have any kind of dependable time-line for exactly how long it will take you to get to work. More cars on the road means slower speeds and increased waiting at lights, etc. There is some variation to train travel as well (not so much in Tokyo usually), but whether a train is empty or is completely packed, it travels down the rails at the same speed. So, while it's not fun being smashed in together with a bunch of strangers, the crowded conditions don't actually slow you down. It's less pleasant than an empty train, but still speedy!
So, to sum up - I think Tokyo's trains are probably more crowded than the trains in New York and London (that depends on the line of course - there are many train lines in Tokyo, some more crowded than others), and for people who find the "Actually Full Train in 1991 (Why Flex-Time is a Good Idea" shocking - I can report that it's not as bad as it looks. And I know what I'm talking about - I've spent many years riding trains like that.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
Sunday, July 06, 2008
"Japan's Clockwork Trains - Sayonara?"
Japan's trains are generally known for three things - 1) They're crowded, 2) They're nearly always on-time, and 3) The super-express (Shinkansen) trains are fast. Many of the trains are less crowded than before (thanks to more of them and to companies allowing flextime), but unfortunately, breaks with the schedule seem to be increasing. (The Shinkansen trains are still fast, and as I very rarely use them, I don't know if they're running precisely on time or not - hopefully they are.) At this rate, Tokyo's famous "always on time & running like clockwork" train system is in danger of becoming just another "always late and off-schedule" system to grumble about. (The Shinkansen trains are in a special category - like aircraft - and don't play a part in most people's commutes to and from work every day.)
Some obvious reasons for slipping schedules, are the many train stopping buttons they've installed on station platforms (which coincide with the aftermath of, and are probably in response to, an incident in which three people were run over by a train (at Shin-Okubo Station on the Yamanote Line) while people on the platform watched helplessly), and less pressure to be at work precisely on time (flex-time is common at many companies now).
Less obvious, but no less real, some segments of society seem to be more prone to destructive actions. ...... Uh-oh... did I just say that? Ouch - now I know I'm old! Well... it's true though; while things still run pretty well, there are many more instances (than before) of people tossing a wrench into the gears for the sport of seeing part of an operation stop (at least temporarily).
Now - I should delete that paragraph above, but I'll leave it in as an example of what happens to a formerly young person who has begun to get old(er). It's a shocking thing - you look at grumpy old people and wonder why they are like that, and one day you wake and up realize you're complaining about irresponsible young people! Whoa! Wait a minute! What's going on here?
And so I have made a transition from shaking my head at the frantic rush into central Tokyo to get to work on time, to shaking my head at a lack of passion for getting to work on time! A couple of examples witnessed first hand.
I was on an express train, standing (always standing, never sitting) near a group of elementary first grade students traveling somewhere (to school for the first time?; on some kind of field trip?) with a woman who was escorting them. After a bit, one of the boys said he was feeling a little queasy, and the woman said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, "Okay, let's stop the train then".
I don't know how that sounds to you, but I was horrified both by the casualness of her remark and the triviality of the reason. She didn't seem to be in the least bothered by the idea of inconveniencing tens of thousands of people (about 2,000 people on one train, and trains all down the line stopped waiting for a train stopped out of place and out of schedule), and not for anything that could really be termed an emergency! If the boy is going to throw up, so be it! Give him a plastic bag! We're not talking about a day-long journey here, all he would have to do is wait an extra fifteen minutes before getting off at the normally scheduled stop. (There's the issue of throwing up *on* people of course - and that's something that's considerate to avoid, but she could have asked for a plastic bag - I'm sure someone had one. In fact, I had one, because I always carry a few for one use or another, including just such an emergency (more on that at the end of this story).
But, horrified as I was, I made no comment, and watched the woman open a window as the train slowly passed a station it wasn't due to stop at, and - sounding like it was actually an emergency - asked the people on the platform to get the train to stop because there was a sick passenger. Someone hit one of the emergency stop buttons (curse them!) and the train stopped. So far, so bad, but it gets worse.
There is a downside to a system that nearly always runs on time. Throw it out-of-whack, and the operators are not well-trained in, or accustomed to, how to think-on-their-feet and improvise a speedy new solution to an unplanned disruption in any given routine. The train stopped soon enough, but it took a few minutes to communicate with the train operators just why one of the platform emergency stop buttons had been pressed (put there to save lives, not for trivial reasons it should be noted). They then opened the doors to let out the boy (and the rest of his group). "Okay" I thought, "Let's get the show back on the road!", but since it was an emergency stop and the system isn't geared to not working on time, it took about five minutes(!) to clear whatever safety procedures (and I'm sure there are many) they have in place and get going again. I thought then, and still think now "Why so long? The sightly queasy boy is off the train. Just re-shut the doors and go!" It shouldn't take more than 20 seconds from the boy getting off to getting things in motion again. (Veteran Tokyo train rider I am - I think great efforts should be expended to keep the trains running On Time.)
At this point, I wish I could jump through to your side of the screen and ask how this sounds to you. Are you shaking your head at the woman forcing an emergency stop for a non-emergency reason, or at me for being callous? My view is the woman is far more callous - ignoring tens of thousands for one person who was not in the slightest bit of danger and had no need for emergency action.
The next example is sort of funny (in an "I shouldn't be laughing at this, but..." kind of way), that - at its core - showcases the very same "Ho-ho! Let's stop the train! It's easy! It's fun! Nobody needs to go anywhere! Ho-ho!" kind of (non-)thinking way.
The day began with me standing on the platform waiting for an express train. I watched a local (that shouldn't have been at the platform at that time) shut its doors and set out, then looked at the clock, which indicated my express should have been leaving (with me aboard) at that exact time. Three minutes later, the express roars in and I walk aboard (the term "climb aboard" isn't applicable here since the platform is exactly the same height as the floor of the train - it's pretty much like walking onto an elevator).
As I walk on with my fellow sardine riders, I wonder if the train will be less crowded than usual due to some earlier riders having taken a local, rather than wait for the express (depending on how many locals leave before the express arrives, they can be faster to a destination - there are only so many places for express trains to pass locals), but then quickly counter that with the thought "There may be fewer people on this train who were on the platform earlier, but there'll be more people who arrived on the platform later!" But (due to there actually being fewer people aboard or not, I'm not sure), I only have two people pressed up against me, compared to a more typical three to six.
I settle in for the ride by listening to my MP3 player (not an i-Pod), after forcing myself to look away from the two over-door monitors. One of them displays useful information about the train route, progress, station information, and news of which train lines are running late, and why (with ludicrous English translations - whoever did them was exceedingly lazy and/or lacking actively firing electrical signals in their head - there are something like ten different phrases that they translated into "Accident" in English), and the other display showing advertisements - some of them soundless versions of existing television ads, and others specifically made for the trains.
I avoid looking at the screens, because I've noticed how I'll be listening to an audio-book on my MP3 player; I'll look up and then realize (after a couple of minutes of watching the screen) that I'm not hearing the words (of the recording I'm listening to) any longer while I process the moving images. "Ah... this is why people are becoming ever more stupid in the world then! They watch TV!" I sometimes think, and then watch some TV on the weekend that I consider to be educational....
I settled into looking out the window between two peoples' heads (I was lucky to be second from the door - when you're stuck in the middle of a sardine run train, sometimes it's hard to find something to aim your eyes at - it's rude to stare at people's faces...), and listened to the classical Japanese story coming from my earphones (well-read and interesting-sounding, although its divergence from modern spoken Japanese makes it hard to understand). Suddenly the train went into hard braking with a simultaneous announcement saying we were making an emergency stop. The first time that happened to me was about a month ago - and large numbers of people fell down (a woman's high heel broke my skin and bloodied my leg in the pile up on the floor). This time around, it was old news ("Oh... another emergency stop..."), and since the train had been traveling fairly slowly anyway (stuck behind a slow local train until we could reach a station with extra rails for passing), no one (that I saw anyway) fell down, and I just braced myself and wondered *why* we were being thrown into an emergency stop (I don't recall hearing an explanation for the other time either - just a "Sorry everyone, we had to make an emergency stop"). Same deal this time, but at least we got back under way fairly quickly.
In re-reading this, it just occurred to me that it could be the ATS (Automatic Train System) jumping on a train that it detects as following too close to another train. The expresses run right behind locals until they get to a station where they can pass. In which case, it would make sense that the train could get under way again quickly. There's something to be said for trains being operated by people rather than computers.
I drifted off to commuter-stupor-land again - looking out the window - basically just waiting for the time of the ride to pass, looking forward to getting off the train and getting on with the day. But... what's this? The woman on my left is looking past me and also looking down, to the right, to the left... "Wha...?" So I look down, back, left, right, expecting to either see that someone has dropped something, or that some pair of sardines are beginning to have an argument (which always makes us other sardines nervous when that - infrequently, fortunately - happens). I don't see either of those things, but instead note that several people in my vicinity are looking left, right, down, left, right... I give the woman who first caught my attention a questioning look and she tells me "Byonin ga iru" ("Someone is sick"). I nod "Ah..." and while I'm just starting to comprehend what the "left-right-down-left-right people are doing (looking for an emergency stop), I see a tall man on the other side of the train open the emergency door release cover (as far as I can tell, on that particular train line, there are no longer any emergency stop buttons/levers on the inside of the train, but pulling the emergency door open lever will obviously also stop the train), and - while I'm thinking "No... please don't do that...", he pulls the lever until it's sticking out at a 90-degree angle.
That pair of doors slightly opens (probably terrifying the people who had been standing up against it!), and the train stops while I imagine the driver looking at an error on his control panel and thinking "What the &%$%?!".
Great - now we're stopped *between* stations - on an *elevated* railway, and the train isn't going to move until the doors are shut again. The driver (or the conductor) comes on the intercom and says "Hasshin era o hakken shimashita" ("A running error has been detected"). I looked over at the source of that error - the guy who had pulled the lever, who was standing there with his arms crossed, looking quite pleased and proud of himself for having figured out how to stop the train, and said (from here out the wholly Japanese conversation at the time translated to English here) "You should close that." He ignored me, so I turned around, shaking my head, and thinking "Alright - we'll just wait this one out then", but after about three seconds of living with that decision, I turned around again in frustration, looked at the lever, and watched as Mr. Lever-Puller then pulled the doors halfway open and poked his head outside (we were in the middle of the train, so both the driver and the conductor were about five cars away). Not seeing anyone, nor anyone seeing him, he pulled his head back in and mostly closed the doors. Another announcement came on that they were still investigating the running error (with 80 pairs of doors on a 10-car train (four per side, eight per car), apparently when one is open, it's not immediately apparent which one - and anyway, I suspect the driver probably imagined it to be a computer or sensor error rather than the doors really being open).
I turned back to the window, away from the source of our troubles, and pondered whether - in my agitated state - my Japanese was up to the task of conveying the lunacy of our disabling the train on an elevated railway between stations. Then, without first working out what to say, I cast aside the general rule of not talking on the train in the morning (not talking is the best way of getting to work without arguments breaking out under sardine conditions) and somehow the vocal gears started turning for me. I said "Okay - so we've got a sick person on board - now we can sit here and watch them die!" This got a response from Mr. Lever-Puller, who looked at me and said with an amazing look of calm & concern "Do you think I should close it?" Struck by the non-combativeness in his way of speaking, I dialed back my frustration a few notches and said "Well... if someone wants to get off the train right here...." So the guy looks at the sick man (who I noticed for the first time - I didn't know who it was before) and asks him with the same calm & concerned look/voice "Do you want to get off here?" The man nodded and started to move towards the door....
I watched in wordless fascination thinking (in pictures and feelings, not words) "Is he really going to climb down off the train right here, onto the elevated tracks? I wonder how much of a walk it is to the next station...." But as he began to move towards the doors, another man said "That's..." which carried a radio-broadcast load of meaning, more fully conveying "That's not a good idea" than actually saying "That's not a good idea". (What the Japanese language lacks in precision and clarity, people often more than make up for with radio broadcasts. Any serious student of the language should bear this factor in mind.) The man stopped, and it was apparent that he was not going to get off the train where we were stopped... with the power to get moving again tantalizingly close at hand ("Shut that emergency door valve!" was my broadcast signal!).
So Mr. Lever-Puller, once again with calm & concern, asked the sick man if he thought we should push the lever back to its normal, closed position. The man gave a small nod, Mr. Lever-Puller became Mr. Lever-Pusher, the doors closed with the same sound they make when closing at stations, and there soon followed an announcement that the error had been cleared. As the train slowly began to move again, I looked back to the sick man and began to wonder what was wrong with him (he looked okay, standing there in an expensive-looking suit). A student offered him a plastic bag, which he refused, and then Mr. Lever-Puller/Pusher quietly confirmed that it was another type of stomach problem. You don't want to know the details, but suffice it to say that the subsequent smell that arose in the carriage explained the exact nature of the man's problem. I sure felt for the guy - he probably had to buy a new suit before going to work, but stopping the train between stations like that hadn't helped him or any of us in any way. It just made things worse. (If someone really needs to get off for an actual emergency, the thing to do, is time the pulling of the emergency lever so that the train stops at a station.
Having said that - did we try stopping the train again for that poor guy? No... the thought didn't occur to me until after I was on my next train, and anyway, by the time we came to the next station after getting under way again, it was too late and I think we all just figured another ten minutes (to the regularly scheduled stop) wasn't going to make much difference. Although... the woman who was standing next to me, looked at me as we passed the next station... maybe she thought I should have pulled the emergency door open lever on our side of the train, where the platform was.
As we picked up speed, I again took to looking out the window, thinking over the morning's events and having a silent discussion with myself wondering if I had acted callously or badly about people wanting to help the guy get off the train. I came to the same conclusion I had already made in the heat of the moment: If stopping the train had helped at least one person in some way, then there's something to think about and discuss, but as it was, it made things worse for everyone - including the man Mr. Lever-Puller was trying to help. (That logic ignores the possibility of trying it again at a station, but the idea of doing that didn't occur to me until I was on my next train. But even then, if the train is running at speed, people could get injured when it's suddenly thrown into emergency braking.)
Interestingly, about five minutes later, suddenly the driver (or conductor) had very precise details about the "running error". They came on the intercom again apologizing for the delay and explaining that there was an indication that a door on the left-hand side of coach #5 had been open. We coach #5 people almost lowered our heads a notch in shame, and I seemed to detect an underlying thought with the announcement along the lines of "What are you idiots in car #5 doing anyway?!" I could only agree.
I think... not so many years ago, that the man with stomach trouble wouldn't have asked to have the train stopped, and the man who pulled the emergency door release, wouldn't have done that. People don't seem to think of the thousands (or tens of thousands) of people they're going to inconvenience in the attempt to help one person. If that one person is having a heart attack or something that really is a life-threatening emergency, then of course it's great to stop the trains, if it helps the individual, but for stomach trouble? How many other people were barely holding on, counting the seconds until they could get off and rush to a restroom? Out of tens of thousands on one of the main rail lines (not an exaggeration), it's not unreasonable to imagine that there are a few individuals in such a state on any given day. That incident made us a further ten minutes late (on top of the initial five minutes) getting into the next station. (We got going again so quickly after the first emergency stop, that I don't think that actually affected the schedule.)
The conclusion? If people continue to stop the trains for frivolous reasons, they will increasingly run off-schedule, until Tokyo's "clockwork" trains become Tokyo's "broken-clockwork" trains.
Ah...I promised to put in my example of having used a plastic bag on a train. It happened like this - there was a man leaving the PR agency (back when I still worked there) for better employment. He was one of a string of people who left, and I was incensed at how the company had a made a big deal about most of the other people, throwing farewell parties for them, etc., but hadn't done anything for this guy, who I thought had done more for the company than many of the others. So, on his final day, I went out and bought some can-chuhai (sort of like vodka), and some things to eat with it, and we had a small (two-person) party in the office after quitting time (there were *always* people working there overtime, so the company was always "open" (for want of a better word) and we just used a conference table over by the balcony. After the chuhai ran out, we were having such a good time, that we raided the company refrigerator, where we discovered left-over supplies from a birthday celebration for another employee, that had occurred the week before. I'm ashamed to write the details, but these supplies included a half-bottle of vodka and a half-bottle of gin. Both of these we fully consumed and I staggered off to the train station to catch the last train home.
So - there I was, standing on the platform at Shinjuku Station, and the last train was approaching the platform just as I was beginning to feel queasy.... What to do - what to do. If I stayed off the train, I would have to find something to do with myself for the night while waiting until the first train at about 4:50 in the morning (Tokyo's entire train system shuts down every night except December 31st). But how could I get on?
Plastic bags to the rescue! I quickly opened my backpack and took two of them out, doubling them up so as to make sure there would be no leakage. The train came in, I climbed in with the rest of the sardines, bags in hand, and sure enough - after about five minutes I had to throw up, which I proceeded to carefully do into the double-walled plastic bag. I can still remember the expression on the face of a woman standing in front of me, who looked nervously back at me while I was throwing up (you can't go anywhere when you're packed into a train like a sardine, so it can't have been a happy discovery that her next-door-neighbor sardine was throwing up), but not to worry - the bags didn't leak and I didn't get anything on anyone. (There must have been some smell though.)
Ugh. I probably shouldn't even tell that story, but I would like to show that I know what I'm talking about when I say it's possible to throw up into a plastic bag on a moving train.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/
http://youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Some obvious reasons for slipping schedules, are the many train stopping buttons they've installed on station platforms (which coincide with the aftermath of, and are probably in response to, an incident in which three people were run over by a train (at Shin-Okubo Station on the Yamanote Line) while people on the platform watched helplessly), and less pressure to be at work precisely on time (flex-time is common at many companies now).
Less obvious, but no less real, some segments of society seem to be more prone to destructive actions. ...... Uh-oh... did I just say that? Ouch - now I know I'm old! Well... it's true though; while things still run pretty well, there are many more instances (than before) of people tossing a wrench into the gears for the sport of seeing part of an operation stop (at least temporarily).
Now - I should delete that paragraph above, but I'll leave it in as an example of what happens to a formerly young person who has begun to get old(er). It's a shocking thing - you look at grumpy old people and wonder why they are like that, and one day you wake and up realize you're complaining about irresponsible young people! Whoa! Wait a minute! What's going on here?
And so I have made a transition from shaking my head at the frantic rush into central Tokyo to get to work on time, to shaking my head at a lack of passion for getting to work on time! A couple of examples witnessed first hand.
I was on an express train, standing (always standing, never sitting) near a group of elementary first grade students traveling somewhere (to school for the first time?; on some kind of field trip?) with a woman who was escorting them. After a bit, one of the boys said he was feeling a little queasy, and the woman said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, "Okay, let's stop the train then".
I don't know how that sounds to you, but I was horrified both by the casualness of her remark and the triviality of the reason. She didn't seem to be in the least bothered by the idea of inconveniencing tens of thousands of people (about 2,000 people on one train, and trains all down the line stopped waiting for a train stopped out of place and out of schedule), and not for anything that could really be termed an emergency! If the boy is going to throw up, so be it! Give him a plastic bag! We're not talking about a day-long journey here, all he would have to do is wait an extra fifteen minutes before getting off at the normally scheduled stop. (There's the issue of throwing up *on* people of course - and that's something that's considerate to avoid, but she could have asked for a plastic bag - I'm sure someone had one. In fact, I had one, because I always carry a few for one use or another, including just such an emergency (more on that at the end of this story).
But, horrified as I was, I made no comment, and watched the woman open a window as the train slowly passed a station it wasn't due to stop at, and - sounding like it was actually an emergency - asked the people on the platform to get the train to stop because there was a sick passenger. Someone hit one of the emergency stop buttons (curse them!) and the train stopped. So far, so bad, but it gets worse.
There is a downside to a system that nearly always runs on time. Throw it out-of-whack, and the operators are not well-trained in, or accustomed to, how to think-on-their-feet and improvise a speedy new solution to an unplanned disruption in any given routine. The train stopped soon enough, but it took a few minutes to communicate with the train operators just why one of the platform emergency stop buttons had been pressed (put there to save lives, not for trivial reasons it should be noted). They then opened the doors to let out the boy (and the rest of his group). "Okay" I thought, "Let's get the show back on the road!", but since it was an emergency stop and the system isn't geared to not working on time, it took about five minutes(!) to clear whatever safety procedures (and I'm sure there are many) they have in place and get going again. I thought then, and still think now "Why so long? The sightly queasy boy is off the train. Just re-shut the doors and go!" It shouldn't take more than 20 seconds from the boy getting off to getting things in motion again. (Veteran Tokyo train rider I am - I think great efforts should be expended to keep the trains running On Time.)
At this point, I wish I could jump through to your side of the screen and ask how this sounds to you. Are you shaking your head at the woman forcing an emergency stop for a non-emergency reason, or at me for being callous? My view is the woman is far more callous - ignoring tens of thousands for one person who was not in the slightest bit of danger and had no need for emergency action.
The next example is sort of funny (in an "I shouldn't be laughing at this, but..." kind of way), that - at its core - showcases the very same "Ho-ho! Let's stop the train! It's easy! It's fun! Nobody needs to go anywhere! Ho-ho!" kind of (non-)thinking way.
The day began with me standing on the platform waiting for an express train. I watched a local (that shouldn't have been at the platform at that time) shut its doors and set out, then looked at the clock, which indicated my express should have been leaving (with me aboard) at that exact time. Three minutes later, the express roars in and I walk aboard (the term "climb aboard" isn't applicable here since the platform is exactly the same height as the floor of the train - it's pretty much like walking onto an elevator).
As I walk on with my fellow sardine riders, I wonder if the train will be less crowded than usual due to some earlier riders having taken a local, rather than wait for the express (depending on how many locals leave before the express arrives, they can be faster to a destination - there are only so many places for express trains to pass locals), but then quickly counter that with the thought "There may be fewer people on this train who were on the platform earlier, but there'll be more people who arrived on the platform later!" But (due to there actually being fewer people aboard or not, I'm not sure), I only have two people pressed up against me, compared to a more typical three to six.
I settle in for the ride by listening to my MP3 player (not an i-Pod), after forcing myself to look away from the two over-door monitors. One of them displays useful information about the train route, progress, station information, and news of which train lines are running late, and why (with ludicrous English translations - whoever did them was exceedingly lazy and/or lacking actively firing electrical signals in their head - there are something like ten different phrases that they translated into "Accident" in English), and the other display showing advertisements - some of them soundless versions of existing television ads, and others specifically made for the trains.
I avoid looking at the screens, because I've noticed how I'll be listening to an audio-book on my MP3 player; I'll look up and then realize (after a couple of minutes of watching the screen) that I'm not hearing the words (of the recording I'm listening to) any longer while I process the moving images. "Ah... this is why people are becoming ever more stupid in the world then! They watch TV!" I sometimes think, and then watch some TV on the weekend that I consider to be educational....
I settled into looking out the window between two peoples' heads (I was lucky to be second from the door - when you're stuck in the middle of a sardine run train, sometimes it's hard to find something to aim your eyes at - it's rude to stare at people's faces...), and listened to the classical Japanese story coming from my earphones (well-read and interesting-sounding, although its divergence from modern spoken Japanese makes it hard to understand). Suddenly the train went into hard braking with a simultaneous announcement saying we were making an emergency stop. The first time that happened to me was about a month ago - and large numbers of people fell down (a woman's high heel broke my skin and bloodied my leg in the pile up on the floor). This time around, it was old news ("Oh... another emergency stop..."), and since the train had been traveling fairly slowly anyway (stuck behind a slow local train until we could reach a station with extra rails for passing), no one (that I saw anyway) fell down, and I just braced myself and wondered *why* we were being thrown into an emergency stop (I don't recall hearing an explanation for the other time either - just a "Sorry everyone, we had to make an emergency stop"). Same deal this time, but at least we got back under way fairly quickly.
In re-reading this, it just occurred to me that it could be the ATS (Automatic Train System) jumping on a train that it detects as following too close to another train. The expresses run right behind locals until they get to a station where they can pass. In which case, it would make sense that the train could get under way again quickly. There's something to be said for trains being operated by people rather than computers.
I drifted off to commuter-stupor-land again - looking out the window - basically just waiting for the time of the ride to pass, looking forward to getting off the train and getting on with the day. But... what's this? The woman on my left is looking past me and also looking down, to the right, to the left... "Wha...?" So I look down, back, left, right, expecting to either see that someone has dropped something, or that some pair of sardines are beginning to have an argument (which always makes us other sardines nervous when that - infrequently, fortunately - happens). I don't see either of those things, but instead note that several people in my vicinity are looking left, right, down, left, right... I give the woman who first caught my attention a questioning look and she tells me "Byonin ga iru" ("Someone is sick"). I nod "Ah..." and while I'm just starting to comprehend what the "left-right-down-left-right people are doing (looking for an emergency stop), I see a tall man on the other side of the train open the emergency door release cover (as far as I can tell, on that particular train line, there are no longer any emergency stop buttons/levers on the inside of the train, but pulling the emergency door open lever will obviously also stop the train), and - while I'm thinking "No... please don't do that...", he pulls the lever until it's sticking out at a 90-degree angle.
That pair of doors slightly opens (probably terrifying the people who had been standing up against it!), and the train stops while I imagine the driver looking at an error on his control panel and thinking "What the &%$%?!".
Great - now we're stopped *between* stations - on an *elevated* railway, and the train isn't going to move until the doors are shut again. The driver (or the conductor) comes on the intercom and says "Hasshin era o hakken shimashita" ("A running error has been detected"). I looked over at the source of that error - the guy who had pulled the lever, who was standing there with his arms crossed, looking quite pleased and proud of himself for having figured out how to stop the train, and said (from here out the wholly Japanese conversation at the time translated to English here) "You should close that." He ignored me, so I turned around, shaking my head, and thinking "Alright - we'll just wait this one out then", but after about three seconds of living with that decision, I turned around again in frustration, looked at the lever, and watched as Mr. Lever-Puller then pulled the doors halfway open and poked his head outside (we were in the middle of the train, so both the driver and the conductor were about five cars away). Not seeing anyone, nor anyone seeing him, he pulled his head back in and mostly closed the doors. Another announcement came on that they were still investigating the running error (with 80 pairs of doors on a 10-car train (four per side, eight per car), apparently when one is open, it's not immediately apparent which one - and anyway, I suspect the driver probably imagined it to be a computer or sensor error rather than the doors really being open).
I turned back to the window, away from the source of our troubles, and pondered whether - in my agitated state - my Japanese was up to the task of conveying the lunacy of our disabling the train on an elevated railway between stations. Then, without first working out what to say, I cast aside the general rule of not talking on the train in the morning (not talking is the best way of getting to work without arguments breaking out under sardine conditions) and somehow the vocal gears started turning for me. I said "Okay - so we've got a sick person on board - now we can sit here and watch them die!" This got a response from Mr. Lever-Puller, who looked at me and said with an amazing look of calm & concern "Do you think I should close it?" Struck by the non-combativeness in his way of speaking, I dialed back my frustration a few notches and said "Well... if someone wants to get off the train right here...." So the guy looks at the sick man (who I noticed for the first time - I didn't know who it was before) and asks him with the same calm & concerned look/voice "Do you want to get off here?" The man nodded and started to move towards the door....
I watched in wordless fascination thinking (in pictures and feelings, not words) "Is he really going to climb down off the train right here, onto the elevated tracks? I wonder how much of a walk it is to the next station...." But as he began to move towards the doors, another man said "That's..." which carried a radio-broadcast load of meaning, more fully conveying "That's not a good idea" than actually saying "That's not a good idea". (What the Japanese language lacks in precision and clarity, people often more than make up for with radio broadcasts. Any serious student of the language should bear this factor in mind.) The man stopped, and it was apparent that he was not going to get off the train where we were stopped... with the power to get moving again tantalizingly close at hand ("Shut that emergency door valve!" was my broadcast signal!).
So Mr. Lever-Puller, once again with calm & concern, asked the sick man if he thought we should push the lever back to its normal, closed position. The man gave a small nod, Mr. Lever-Puller became Mr. Lever-Pusher, the doors closed with the same sound they make when closing at stations, and there soon followed an announcement that the error had been cleared. As the train slowly began to move again, I looked back to the sick man and began to wonder what was wrong with him (he looked okay, standing there in an expensive-looking suit). A student offered him a plastic bag, which he refused, and then Mr. Lever-Puller/Pusher quietly confirmed that it was another type of stomach problem. You don't want to know the details, but suffice it to say that the subsequent smell that arose in the carriage explained the exact nature of the man's problem. I sure felt for the guy - he probably had to buy a new suit before going to work, but stopping the train between stations like that hadn't helped him or any of us in any way. It just made things worse. (If someone really needs to get off for an actual emergency, the thing to do, is time the pulling of the emergency lever so that the train stops at a station.
Having said that - did we try stopping the train again for that poor guy? No... the thought didn't occur to me until after I was on my next train, and anyway, by the time we came to the next station after getting under way again, it was too late and I think we all just figured another ten minutes (to the regularly scheduled stop) wasn't going to make much difference. Although... the woman who was standing next to me, looked at me as we passed the next station... maybe she thought I should have pulled the emergency door open lever on our side of the train, where the platform was.
As we picked up speed, I again took to looking out the window, thinking over the morning's events and having a silent discussion with myself wondering if I had acted callously or badly about people wanting to help the guy get off the train. I came to the same conclusion I had already made in the heat of the moment: If stopping the train had helped at least one person in some way, then there's something to think about and discuss, but as it was, it made things worse for everyone - including the man Mr. Lever-Puller was trying to help. (That logic ignores the possibility of trying it again at a station, but the idea of doing that didn't occur to me until I was on my next train. But even then, if the train is running at speed, people could get injured when it's suddenly thrown into emergency braking.)
Interestingly, about five minutes later, suddenly the driver (or conductor) had very precise details about the "running error". They came on the intercom again apologizing for the delay and explaining that there was an indication that a door on the left-hand side of coach #5 had been open. We coach #5 people almost lowered our heads a notch in shame, and I seemed to detect an underlying thought with the announcement along the lines of "What are you idiots in car #5 doing anyway?!" I could only agree.
I think... not so many years ago, that the man with stomach trouble wouldn't have asked to have the train stopped, and the man who pulled the emergency door release, wouldn't have done that. People don't seem to think of the thousands (or tens of thousands) of people they're going to inconvenience in the attempt to help one person. If that one person is having a heart attack or something that really is a life-threatening emergency, then of course it's great to stop the trains, if it helps the individual, but for stomach trouble? How many other people were barely holding on, counting the seconds until they could get off and rush to a restroom? Out of tens of thousands on one of the main rail lines (not an exaggeration), it's not unreasonable to imagine that there are a few individuals in such a state on any given day. That incident made us a further ten minutes late (on top of the initial five minutes) getting into the next station. (We got going again so quickly after the first emergency stop, that I don't think that actually affected the schedule.)
The conclusion? If people continue to stop the trains for frivolous reasons, they will increasingly run off-schedule, until Tokyo's "clockwork" trains become Tokyo's "broken-clockwork" trains.
Ah...I promised to put in my example of having used a plastic bag on a train. It happened like this - there was a man leaving the PR agency (back when I still worked there) for better employment. He was one of a string of people who left, and I was incensed at how the company had a made a big deal about most of the other people, throwing farewell parties for them, etc., but hadn't done anything for this guy, who I thought had done more for the company than many of the others. So, on his final day, I went out and bought some can-chuhai (sort of like vodka), and some things to eat with it, and we had a small (two-person) party in the office after quitting time (there were *always* people working there overtime, so the company was always "open" (for want of a better word) and we just used a conference table over by the balcony. After the chuhai ran out, we were having such a good time, that we raided the company refrigerator, where we discovered left-over supplies from a birthday celebration for another employee, that had occurred the week before. I'm ashamed to write the details, but these supplies included a half-bottle of vodka and a half-bottle of gin. Both of these we fully consumed and I staggered off to the train station to catch the last train home.
So - there I was, standing on the platform at Shinjuku Station, and the last train was approaching the platform just as I was beginning to feel queasy.... What to do - what to do. If I stayed off the train, I would have to find something to do with myself for the night while waiting until the first train at about 4:50 in the morning (Tokyo's entire train system shuts down every night except December 31st). But how could I get on?
Plastic bags to the rescue! I quickly opened my backpack and took two of them out, doubling them up so as to make sure there would be no leakage. The train came in, I climbed in with the rest of the sardines, bags in hand, and sure enough - after about five minutes I had to throw up, which I proceeded to carefully do into the double-walled plastic bag. I can still remember the expression on the face of a woman standing in front of me, who looked nervously back at me while I was throwing up (you can't go anywhere when you're packed into a train like a sardine, so it can't have been a happy discovery that her next-door-neighbor sardine was throwing up), but not to worry - the bags didn't leak and I didn't get anything on anyone. (There must have been some smell though.)
Ugh. I probably shouldn't even tell that story, but I would like to show that I know what I'm talking about when I say it's possible to throw up into a plastic bag on a moving train.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/
http://youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
