I stayed up late last night watching a documentary movie - woke up late today, and then revisited 1991 again via a July 27th, 1991 video of taking the first train from Nakano Station, and then taking a few more trains and ending up in Toride (on the Joban Line). Other than that, I just did some things around the apartment, and now here I sit writing this, shaking my head at the time - 9:12 p.m. Where did all those hours go? It's hard to say, but as for the video, here is an edited version of it ("Tokyo Sunrise (Nakano to Toride) - July 27th, 1991"):
And here is the same text I posted to YouTube to explain it:
Starting off before sunrise, I arrive at Nakano Station with the dawn, and take the first Tokyo-bound Chuo Line train. Getting off here and there, I eventually arrive in Toride. Several views of the orange morning skies from the train windows, some with the window open. One view of a couple of late nighters asleep on a morning train, which they probably waited for after missing the last train the night before.
Thinking I'm posting too many 1991 (and 1990) videos, I posted a 2009 video (from May) of the ticket gates at Kawasaki. I was there waiting for a friend and the sight of so many people pouring through the gates seemed interesting, so I recorded a bit, edited that, and titled it: "Kawasaki Station Ticket Gates - May 2009":
The text I posted to explain it is:
Kawasaki Station is - among countless other stations in the greater Tokyo area (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, & Chiba) - quite busy during rush hour. This was taken at around 6:40 p.m. on a weekday evening in May of 2009. It gets to a point where you start to feel dizzy trying to take in the ceaseless flow. Water flowing by is a smooth blur, but people flowing by provide enough things to focus on, that the constant mixed motion becomes disorienting....
And that's about it. Those 1991 videos.... Sigh.... The thing is, I spent so much time and effort recording those pictures & sounds at the time, as I look at them again, I'm catching a bit of the old video passion that drove me in the early nineties, and feel like doing something with the material. Thus the YouTube postings. I suppose they bore most people to tears, but if they're interesting to at least a few people, I guess that makes the effort worth it. Also I'm personally very interested in documentary material, so I think they have value for anyone wishing to understand how Tokyo was at the time I recorded them.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
"Multi-Clouds, Nishi-Ogikubo, & Inbound Night Trains"
July 29th was one of those days where I had what felt like profound thoughts at the time, but by the time I sat down in front of a computer to pound them into electrons, things had gone ordinary again. In any case, the dual-layer clouds, with a nearly stationary layer up high and a swiftly moving lower layer, all overlooked by a half-moon visible now and then in blue gaps in the clouds, were quite interesting to watch in the evening, as I relate here (with a few photos that don't do the scene justice):
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/PhotoGlryMain/pgc/MultiClouds01b.html
After watching the clouds a little in Ebisu, I went over to Nishi-Ogikubo and took some photos there of a retro-drinking area.
"Inbound Tokyo Night Train - July 1991"
In this video, I take a Seibu-Shinjuku Line train from Tanashi Station to a station near Nakano-ku (not Nakano Station) and then take a bus towards Nakano Station, stopping midway to visit a friend for a quick hello before heading out for a day of video recording (the video ends on the night streets of an area of Nakano-ku after getting off the bus). If you have noticed how crowded the trains in Tokyo can be, this video shows how empty they can be if you're traveling in the opposite direction from the main flow! Going into central Tokyo late at night, the train is almost completely empty. The trains zooming by in the other direction, by contrast, are mostly full.
Regarding the bus ride: After my comment about my last night bus video that the voice seems to be the same for the different bus companies, I think I may have been wrong about that. Listening carefully to the recording in this video from a different bus company, the voice is of the same style, but I think is a different person.
Incidentally, one viewer of this video wrote:
"This video is especially surreal. Maybe it's the empty nighttime that does it. But I think, you'd been drinking..."
I responded to this with two messages, first this one:
"Tokyo is weird that way. One hour you're a sardine and you wonder how it is you came to be living in such a high density city, and the next you're in an empty train car. It really can be weird. Drinking? Why? No - I think I may have had a beer *after* this at my friend's house, which happens just after the end of the video though. - LHS"
- and later with:
"Okay - I'll go ahead and take the "drinking" comment as an insult then. It's interesting how you pair insults with compliments and then the insults almost don't seem like insults. I might even try that the next time I want to insult someone. - LHS"
[If I sound overly touchy in my reply, please keep in mind that I've had several similar comments from this same person, who often pairs insulting comments with compliments - so this isn't the first time.]
I suppose the viewer might watch the views out the train window, where the camera operator (cough-cough) is obviously hanging out the window, and come to the conclusion that someone could only be hanging out the window if they are under the influence of alcohol. But anyone who knows a dedicated photographer won't be surprised. Photographers will go to great lengths in the quest for interesting images! Some of these attempts turn out, and some don't, but if you really want to take interesting images, you have to try....
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/PhotoGlryMain/pgc/MultiClouds01b.html
After watching the clouds a little in Ebisu, I went over to Nishi-Ogikubo and took some photos there of a retro-drinking area.
"Inbound Tokyo Night Train - July 1991"
In this video, I take a Seibu-Shinjuku Line train from Tanashi Station to a station near Nakano-ku (not Nakano Station) and then take a bus towards Nakano Station, stopping midway to visit a friend for a quick hello before heading out for a day of video recording (the video ends on the night streets of an area of Nakano-ku after getting off the bus). If you have noticed how crowded the trains in Tokyo can be, this video shows how empty they can be if you're traveling in the opposite direction from the main flow! Going into central Tokyo late at night, the train is almost completely empty. The trains zooming by in the other direction, by contrast, are mostly full.
Regarding the bus ride: After my comment about my last night bus video that the voice seems to be the same for the different bus companies, I think I may have been wrong about that. Listening carefully to the recording in this video from a different bus company, the voice is of the same style, but I think is a different person.
Incidentally, one viewer of this video wrote:
"This video is especially surreal. Maybe it's the empty nighttime that does it. But I think, you'd been drinking..."
I responded to this with two messages, first this one:
"Tokyo is weird that way. One hour you're a sardine and you wonder how it is you came to be living in such a high density city, and the next you're in an empty train car. It really can be weird. Drinking? Why? No - I think I may have had a beer *after* this at my friend's house, which happens just after the end of the video though. - LHS"
- and later with:
"Okay - I'll go ahead and take the "drinking" comment as an insult then. It's interesting how you pair insults with compliments and then the insults almost don't seem like insults. I might even try that the next time I want to insult someone. - LHS"
[If I sound overly touchy in my reply, please keep in mind that I've had several similar comments from this same person, who often pairs insulting comments with compliments - so this isn't the first time.]
I suppose the viewer might watch the views out the train window, where the camera operator (cough-cough) is obviously hanging out the window, and come to the conclusion that someone could only be hanging out the window if they are under the influence of alcohol. But anyone who knows a dedicated photographer won't be surprised. Photographers will go to great lengths in the quest for interesting images! Some of these attempts turn out, and some don't, but if you really want to take interesting images, you have to try....
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Saturday, August 01, 2009
"Tokyo Night Bus Ride - July 1991"
August 1st, 2009 - Just when I'm feeling used to summer being here and happy that it's not winter - thinking that last winter is long gone and next winter is far in the future, the calendar clangs into August and I look ahead and see September (shudder) on the other side. Best not to look ahead too much at times like this!
My time machine travels to July 1991 continue (via video & sound recordings I made at the time). In: "Ikebukuro to Hibarigaoka - July1991", I sat right behind the driver (engineer?) of a Seibu-Ikebukuro Line train outbound from Ikebukuro, and recorded him accelerating away from... Shakujikoen Station with independent power and braking controls (they are often integrated into one control lever these days). The clip ends when I get off the train in Hibarigaoka:
Later that same day, I went back out and took a late evening bus. The "Tokyo Night Bus - Hibarigaoka to Tanashi - July 1991" video clip starts near the bus (terminal) stop in front of Hibarigaoka Station. The bus had (as most buses did at the time) a manual shift transmission, with the type of (recorded) announcement that all the buses I used back then played (is it the same woman who made all those recordings?)
The clip shows scenes and sounds from the time, beginning with the walk to Hibarigaoka Station, and then finishing with the walk to Tanashi Station (on the Seibu-Shinjuku Line) when I get off the bus on the other end of the ride:
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
My time machine travels to July 1991 continue (via video & sound recordings I made at the time). In: "Ikebukuro to Hibarigaoka - July1991", I sat right behind the driver (engineer?) of a Seibu-Ikebukuro Line train outbound from Ikebukuro, and recorded him accelerating away from... Shakujikoen Station with independent power and braking controls (they are often integrated into one control lever these days). The clip ends when I get off the train in Hibarigaoka:
Later that same day, I went back out and took a late evening bus. The "Tokyo Night Bus - Hibarigaoka to Tanashi - July 1991" video clip starts near the bus (terminal) stop in front of Hibarigaoka Station. The bus had (as most buses did at the time) a manual shift transmission, with the type of (recorded) announcement that all the buses I used back then played (is it the same woman who made all those recordings?)
The clip shows scenes and sounds from the time, beginning with the walk to Hibarigaoka Station, and then finishing with the walk to Tanashi Station (on the Seibu-Shinjuku Line) when I get off the bus on the other end of the ride:
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Monday, July 27, 2009
"Long Summer Dresses"
I've been interacting with the closest thing I have to a time machine - my old video recordings - and it's a strange feeling looking at the scenes I recorded while walking around in Tokyo back then. I've spent my life watching recorded images from (nearly?) all years in which moving pictures were recordable, but it's always been someone else's viewpoint. There's something almost eerie about seeing the very same scenes I saw in real time 18 years ago, from the very same vantage point and recorded by myself. So many things that I'd forgotten about come back into active memory while watching the scenes again.
I've mentioned before (several times?) the realization that most, not some, but *most* of what we experience day by day goes missing in the dusty archives of our minds, but with a few recent video clips that I edited and posted to YouTube, women's clothing fashions stand out. I didn't notice it quite so much with 1991 winter clothing, but the summer clothing of 1991 Tokyo women looks quite different from what women are wearing in summer 2009. The most striking thing is probably the large number of women wearing long skirts. That and the different hair styles of the time make it look like such a different era....
I'm looking at what were young and modern women in 1991, thinking how they are now middle-aged women, and thinking how current modern women in 2009 will be middle aged women in their time, and I'm beginning to think that the whole concept of "modern" is a mistake. What is called "modern" is supposed to be what is coming, but more often it's just what is now that wasn't yesterday, but it won't make it to tomorrow.
Yawn... I'm putting myself to sleep writing this, so it must be even worse for people reading it! Sorry.....
Oh - here are a couple of videos that I haven't introduced in the blog yet:
"Gotanda to Nishimagome to Gotanda" - July 1991
Trip to Nishimagome from Gotanda, and then back to Gotanda.
On the way to Nishimagome: Nearly empty train (going away from central Tokyo). Since the subway is not air-conditioned, most of the windows are open. The sounds are completely different from newer air conditioned trains.
At the top of the escalator, there are creaky old escalator noises.
Near Nishimagome Station, a pair ride by on a bicycle, with a man standing on hub extenders on the back. I don't think this was ever exactly legal, but you used to see it from time to time. I haven't seen this at all lately. Maybe the police put a stop to it.
And:
"Gotanda to Shinjuku (& Ikebukuro)" - July 1991
Taking the Yamanote Line from Gotanda to Shinjuku, shopping in Shinjuku, and then taking the Saikyo Line from Shinjuku to Ikebukuro.
Of note - many women in long summer dresses that look really old fashioned by today's standards. A good look at the platform at Ebisu Station - just an open-air platform when this video was taken in July 1991 (now radically different). When coming into Shibuya Station, the view over to the Toyoko Line is unobstructed - this was before the Saikyo Line was extended to Ebisu.
July 25th, 1991... and posted to YouTube on July 25th, 2009. Eighteen years later....
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
I've mentioned before (several times?) the realization that most, not some, but *most* of what we experience day by day goes missing in the dusty archives of our minds, but with a few recent video clips that I edited and posted to YouTube, women's clothing fashions stand out. I didn't notice it quite so much with 1991 winter clothing, but the summer clothing of 1991 Tokyo women looks quite different from what women are wearing in summer 2009. The most striking thing is probably the large number of women wearing long skirts. That and the different hair styles of the time make it look like such a different era....
I'm looking at what were young and modern women in 1991, thinking how they are now middle-aged women, and thinking how current modern women in 2009 will be middle aged women in their time, and I'm beginning to think that the whole concept of "modern" is a mistake. What is called "modern" is supposed to be what is coming, but more often it's just what is now that wasn't yesterday, but it won't make it to tomorrow.
Yawn... I'm putting myself to sleep writing this, so it must be even worse for people reading it! Sorry.....
Oh - here are a couple of videos that I haven't introduced in the blog yet:
"Gotanda to Nishimagome to Gotanda" - July 1991
Trip to Nishimagome from Gotanda, and then back to Gotanda.
On the way to Nishimagome: Nearly empty train (going away from central Tokyo). Since the subway is not air-conditioned, most of the windows are open. The sounds are completely different from newer air conditioned trains.
At the top of the escalator, there are creaky old escalator noises.
Near Nishimagome Station, a pair ride by on a bicycle, with a man standing on hub extenders on the back. I don't think this was ever exactly legal, but you used to see it from time to time. I haven't seen this at all lately. Maybe the police put a stop to it.
And:
"Gotanda to Shinjuku (& Ikebukuro)" - July 1991
Taking the Yamanote Line from Gotanda to Shinjuku, shopping in Shinjuku, and then taking the Saikyo Line from Shinjuku to Ikebukuro.
Of note - many women in long summer dresses that look really old fashioned by today's standards. A good look at the platform at Ebisu Station - just an open-air platform when this video was taken in July 1991 (now radically different). When coming into Shibuya Station, the view over to the Toyoko Line is unobstructed - this was before the Saikyo Line was extended to Ebisu.
July 25th, 1991... and posted to YouTube on July 25th, 2009. Eighteen years later....
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
"Chaos to Order to Chaos to...?"
When I arrived in Japan in the summer of 1984, the orderly lining up for trains in neat rows of three seemed right enough that I never even thought about it. On the other hand, I wondered why there were separate lines for each ATM machine at the bank, each order window at fast-food restaurants, and a near free-for-all for public phones (although there were sort of separate lines for each phone in some cases). On escalators, people rapidly stood on both sides of each step, making any walking progress impossible.
Then many things got better. Single lines were set up at banks and fast-food restaurants, and people began standing on the left on escalators, allowing passing on the right (same as the roads in Japan, although I've heard the left-right orientation (on escalators) is opposite in Osaka, possible due to the 1970 Expo there...).
And now... the one thing that was most orderly back in 1984 - lining up for trains - is beginning to fall apart. A few years ago, I began seeing people lining up in twos instead of threes, and while I could appreciate the concept of two lines evenly splitting when the train arrives, it's a bad idea when it's crowded (not at all a rare occurrence in Tokyo!), as people quickly end up lining up all the way across the platform, making it difficult (or nearly impossible, or impossible) to walk along the platform, and forcing people to mill about between the lines once there is no more room to line up. At Shinjuku Station, the platform workers used to work at getting people to line up in threes, and I heard some announcements asking people to line up threes, but now it's gotten to the point where it seems like most people are lining up in twos as though it were their religion - "Thou shalt line up in twos and disrupt the platform!".
Just as I was getting (grudgingly) getting used to everyone lining up only in twos, I began seeing (on one branch line), some people forming a single line! Now, if you're getting on an airplane or a reserved seat train, this is what you should do, but the logistics of transporting vast numbers of people in Tokyo screamingly does not allow for single lines for the cattle cars! When I saw some people doing that, I began to wonder "What are they doing? Daring people to walk around them? Something has to give here..."
And... that something appears to be the new popular rage in Tokyo - line breaking! Now, however people are lining up (in twos or threes), I'm seeing people blasting past everyone and just going straight for the door. In some situations, this is almost understandable. For example, at Shinjuku Station in the morning, each and every 11-car train (arriving & departing every two or three minutes) is full. Some are smash-'em-in sardine can style full, and a lot of people don't even try to get on, but form a line waiting for the next train. So, if you get to the platform after the lined up people who were boarding get on, there is often a ten to fifteen second window of opportunity to get on the train. In this case, you cruise past the people lined up (who are not even attempting to get on the train), and jump (or push) aboard.
So you've got this situation of people lining up for trains incorrectly (for conditions) in the first place, combined with situations where it's actually okay to walk past the line, and there are beginning to be a number of people who seem to think that they have a right to just blast in front of everyone all the time, whenever they see a door open. Having this happen repeatedly, people are getting more blood-thirsty about getting on and off the trains.
Bringing everything full-circle, I was talking with a from-birth local who told me that when they were a child (about 45 years ago), people didn't line up for trains and it was just a free-for-all when boarding. Hearing that, and looking at the current state of things, I would say Japan is just a few steps away from coming full circle with the trains, and getting back to free-for-all boarding. Not a happy development, but at least bank and restaurant lines are still orderly....
As for when things were still orderly, have a look at this July 1991 video, "Hibarigaoka to Gotanda - July 1991" (which doesn't show things in the rush, but still):
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Then many things got better. Single lines were set up at banks and fast-food restaurants, and people began standing on the left on escalators, allowing passing on the right (same as the roads in Japan, although I've heard the left-right orientation (on escalators) is opposite in Osaka, possible due to the 1970 Expo there...).
And now... the one thing that was most orderly back in 1984 - lining up for trains - is beginning to fall apart. A few years ago, I began seeing people lining up in twos instead of threes, and while I could appreciate the concept of two lines evenly splitting when the train arrives, it's a bad idea when it's crowded (not at all a rare occurrence in Tokyo!), as people quickly end up lining up all the way across the platform, making it difficult (or nearly impossible, or impossible) to walk along the platform, and forcing people to mill about between the lines once there is no more room to line up. At Shinjuku Station, the platform workers used to work at getting people to line up in threes, and I heard some announcements asking people to line up threes, but now it's gotten to the point where it seems like most people are lining up in twos as though it were their religion - "Thou shalt line up in twos and disrupt the platform!".
Just as I was getting (grudgingly) getting used to everyone lining up only in twos, I began seeing (on one branch line), some people forming a single line! Now, if you're getting on an airplane or a reserved seat train, this is what you should do, but the logistics of transporting vast numbers of people in Tokyo screamingly does not allow for single lines for the cattle cars! When I saw some people doing that, I began to wonder "What are they doing? Daring people to walk around them? Something has to give here..."
And... that something appears to be the new popular rage in Tokyo - line breaking! Now, however people are lining up (in twos or threes), I'm seeing people blasting past everyone and just going straight for the door. In some situations, this is almost understandable. For example, at Shinjuku Station in the morning, each and every 11-car train (arriving & departing every two or three minutes) is full. Some are smash-'em-in sardine can style full, and a lot of people don't even try to get on, but form a line waiting for the next train. So, if you get to the platform after the lined up people who were boarding get on, there is often a ten to fifteen second window of opportunity to get on the train. In this case, you cruise past the people lined up (who are not even attempting to get on the train), and jump (or push) aboard.
So you've got this situation of people lining up for trains incorrectly (for conditions) in the first place, combined with situations where it's actually okay to walk past the line, and there are beginning to be a number of people who seem to think that they have a right to just blast in front of everyone all the time, whenever they see a door open. Having this happen repeatedly, people are getting more blood-thirsty about getting on and off the trains.
Bringing everything full-circle, I was talking with a from-birth local who told me that when they were a child (about 45 years ago), people didn't line up for trains and it was just a free-for-all when boarding. Hearing that, and looking at the current state of things, I would say Japan is just a few steps away from coming full circle with the trains, and getting back to free-for-all boarding. Not a happy development, but at least bank and restaurant lines are still orderly....
As for when things were still orderly, have a look at this July 1991 video, "Hibarigaoka to Gotanda - July 1991" (which doesn't show things in the rush, but still):
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Saturday, July 18, 2009
"Disposable Contract Workers must not have Opinions"
Hierarchy for hierarchy's sake... not again!
I went drinking with a few middle-management types last night and things were going okay until one of them complained that the avocados in some dish or other that we ordered were "rotten". Since they were not in fact rotten, but only slightly on the soft side (I used to buy one every day in California, I actually have pretty extensive experience and knowledge about this), I stated this fact and ran into a "You - as a lowly & disposable contract worker - are not allowed to contradict his lordship I - lofty middle-level manager!" wall.
Some people... don't know how to act like people. I think in the future if I'm in a position to go drinking with a company person I've not been drinking with before, I should first ask "Are you, by chance, in a middle-management role?". If an affirmative answer to that query bounces back, then I had better think "Red Alert! - Red Alert!! - Middle-level management demon dead ahead! Evasive emergency action, commence... now!!!" and say "Let me check my schedule... oh... rotten luck. I'm meeting some friends from out of town then. Maybe some other time!" and then get far-far-far away from the danger before the possibility of triggering some middle-management evil impulse arises.
There's this thing in Japan where it's supposed to be okay to hash things out over drinks, but that only really applies if you're a "seishain" (regular lifetime employee). Disposable contract workers aren't really considered to be human beings and are only jovially tolerated so long as they are friendly no matter what, have titanium smiles able to withstand the most uncalled for insults, and under no circumstances commit the unpardonable offense of actually having an opinion.
At the moment, I'm thinking artists are 500,000 times more human than middle-management... people.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
I went drinking with a few middle-management types last night and things were going okay until one of them complained that the avocados in some dish or other that we ordered were "rotten". Since they were not in fact rotten, but only slightly on the soft side (I used to buy one every day in California, I actually have pretty extensive experience and knowledge about this), I stated this fact and ran into a "You - as a lowly & disposable contract worker - are not allowed to contradict his lordship I - lofty middle-level manager!" wall.
Some people... don't know how to act like people. I think in the future if I'm in a position to go drinking with a company person I've not been drinking with before, I should first ask "Are you, by chance, in a middle-management role?". If an affirmative answer to that query bounces back, then I had better think "Red Alert! - Red Alert!! - Middle-level management demon dead ahead! Evasive emergency action, commence... now!!!" and say "Let me check my schedule... oh... rotten luck. I'm meeting some friends from out of town then. Maybe some other time!" and then get far-far-far away from the danger before the possibility of triggering some middle-management evil impulse arises.
There's this thing in Japan where it's supposed to be okay to hash things out over drinks, but that only really applies if you're a "seishain" (regular lifetime employee). Disposable contract workers aren't really considered to be human beings and are only jovially tolerated so long as they are friendly no matter what, have titanium smiles able to withstand the most uncalled for insults, and under no circumstances commit the unpardonable offense of actually having an opinion.
At the moment, I'm thinking artists are 500,000 times more human than middle-management... people.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Friday, July 10, 2009
"Into Video Lately..."
"Company Event in Tokyo - 2000"
A company event held in a rented space in 2000 (or was it 2001? I'm not sure, but I think 2000 - I didn't label the tape!). The space was quite good, with good equipment, etc., but not in a very convenient location. Most of us came by taxi.
The only copy I have remaining of this is a VHS tape that I digitized for editing for this post. Bloody VHS... it doesn't last! Parts of the images in some places have turned various shades of light purple at the top of the screen.
"Nishi-Ogikubo (& the Chuo Line)" (June 2009)
Beginning with a view inside the Chuo Line, I then get off at Nishi-Ogikubo Station and walk off into the suburbs between Nishi-Ogikubo and Kichijoji.
"Tokyo Subway (Marunouchi & Tozai) - June 1990"
Tuesday, June 19th, 1990 - Starting off with a quick view of me on a public phone (they were still used in 1990), following by a quick view of the Marunouchi Line (an old Red & White one - now running in Argentina), I then change trains and get on the Tozai Line. Notice that the ticket gates consist of a live person sitting there to take tickets. Also notice that the announcement in the train is made by a live human being and not a recording. Also there are no over-pronounced, over-intonated, culture-less, half-speed, and extraordinarily irritating announcements in English. (The announcement for Kayabacho Station is a recording, but at least it's in the local language.) It wraps up with me on another public phone. There were cell phones then, but they were quite expensive, so most people didn't have them.
"Diagonal Subway Views - June 1990 (Tokyo)"
Starting with a quick view of the (by today's standards) large camera (held by myself) and then a view of the office I used to work at near Tamachi Station, then a look up at the buildings above before going underground into the subway system. First is a a ride on the Hanzomon Line, and then a transfer to the Marunouchi Line (one of the new - currently getting old! - ones, which were just being introduced at the time), and finishing with a street view at night. Notice in subway views from this time period that the windows are often open. They didn't have air condition the subway system as soon as the surface trains due to the heat generated by air conditioning units (on the trains) that would have heated the stations. So they first air conditioned the stations, and then installed air conditioning on the subway trains.
"Ontakesan Evening (Tokyu-Ikegami Line) - June 2009"
The video begins near Senzokuike Station and then I take the Ikegami Line down to Ontakesan Station, where I video the evening shopping scene and visit a nearby shrine.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
A company event held in a rented space in 2000 (or was it 2001? I'm not sure, but I think 2000 - I didn't label the tape!). The space was quite good, with good equipment, etc., but not in a very convenient location. Most of us came by taxi.
The only copy I have remaining of this is a VHS tape that I digitized for editing for this post. Bloody VHS... it doesn't last! Parts of the images in some places have turned various shades of light purple at the top of the screen.
"Nishi-Ogikubo (& the Chuo Line)" (June 2009)
Beginning with a view inside the Chuo Line, I then get off at Nishi-Ogikubo Station and walk off into the suburbs between Nishi-Ogikubo and Kichijoji.
"Tokyo Subway (Marunouchi & Tozai) - June 1990"
Tuesday, June 19th, 1990 - Starting off with a quick view of me on a public phone (they were still used in 1990), following by a quick view of the Marunouchi Line (an old Red & White one - now running in Argentina), I then change trains and get on the Tozai Line. Notice that the ticket gates consist of a live person sitting there to take tickets. Also notice that the announcement in the train is made by a live human being and not a recording. Also there are no over-pronounced, over-intonated, culture-less, half-speed, and extraordinarily irritating announcements in English. (The announcement for Kayabacho Station is a recording, but at least it's in the local language.) It wraps up with me on another public phone. There were cell phones then, but they were quite expensive, so most people didn't have them.
"Diagonal Subway Views - June 1990 (Tokyo)"
Starting with a quick view of the (by today's standards) large camera (held by myself) and then a view of the office I used to work at near Tamachi Station, then a look up at the buildings above before going underground into the subway system. First is a a ride on the Hanzomon Line, and then a transfer to the Marunouchi Line (one of the new - currently getting old! - ones, which were just being introduced at the time), and finishing with a street view at night. Notice in subway views from this time period that the windows are often open. They didn't have air condition the subway system as soon as the surface trains due to the heat generated by air conditioning units (on the trains) that would have heated the stations. So they first air conditioned the stations, and then installed air conditioning on the subway trains.
"Ontakesan Evening (Tokyu-Ikegami Line) - June 2009"
The video begins near Senzokuike Station and then I take the Ikegami Line down to Ontakesan Station, where I video the evening shopping scene and visit a nearby shrine.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Friday, July 03, 2009
"Shifts Might be Nice..."
I went to the dentist yesterday morning, so I took a half-day off from work. As it turned out, I finished early at the dentist and had some extra time, so I went over to Akihabara (a.k.a. "Akiba") to check out some computer parts, etc.
Well, at least that was the plan... but arriving in Akihabara just after 10:00 a.m., I was greeted with a sea of closed shops! "Oh yeah... since the shops tend to be open until 7:00 p.m. and companies religiously avoid having shifts, they open late to avoid getting into an overtime pay situation!" thought I.
And so goes my rant, but certainly - given the choice between retail shops being from 10:00 to 6:00 or from 11:00 to 7:00, I'd prefer the 11:00 to 7:00. It only becomes irritating when I have some time in the morning and would actually like to do something before lunch! Added to the fact that Tokyo is in the wrong time zone and there's no DST in the summer to push the clock back, you could almost say that shops don't open until the afternoon.
Oh well - who needs retail before lunch anyway, hey?
I mentioned this situation at work, and a fellow biped in the office said "So what makes you an expert on this?". Being a bit flustered at the sudden attack, I didn't have a good comeback, but I wish I'd said "It's called observation and thinking. You should try it some time."
Anyway....
Sleep... need sleep... sleep... .......
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Well, at least that was the plan... but arriving in Akihabara just after 10:00 a.m., I was greeted with a sea of closed shops! "Oh yeah... since the shops tend to be open until 7:00 p.m. and companies religiously avoid having shifts, they open late to avoid getting into an overtime pay situation!" thought I.
And so goes my rant, but certainly - given the choice between retail shops being from 10:00 to 6:00 or from 11:00 to 7:00, I'd prefer the 11:00 to 7:00. It only becomes irritating when I have some time in the morning and would actually like to do something before lunch! Added to the fact that Tokyo is in the wrong time zone and there's no DST in the summer to push the clock back, you could almost say that shops don't open until the afternoon.
Oh well - who needs retail before lunch anyway, hey?
I mentioned this situation at work, and a fellow biped in the office said "So what makes you an expert on this?". Being a bit flustered at the sudden attack, I didn't have a good comeback, but I wish I'd said "It's called observation and thinking. You should try it some time."
Anyway....
Sleep... need sleep... sleep... .......
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Friday, June 26, 2009
"Shinjuku to Koenji on the Chuo Line + SqClRe" - June 2009
The lazy way to show what's between two points on a rail line, is to aim a motion picture camera out the window. There are three basic ways of doing this: 1) Angle the camera forward, 2) Look straight out perpendicular to the direction of travel, or 3) Angle the camera rearward. When objects are far away, #2 can be nice, but in Tokyo, generally there are buildings quite close to the railway, so looking straight out produces a very ugly effect of blurred jerky boxes, as the camera's 30-images per second isn't nearly fast enough to deal with the speed of objects passing by the lens. That leaves either looking forward or looking rearward (unless you're at the extreme ends of the train, where you can look directly forward or directly rearward). For this video I looked rearward at an angle, since that direction contained the receding skyline of Shinjuku:
This was taken in the early evening on a weekday, just before the evening crush rush got into high gear. The Chuo Line is the (or "one-of-the", but I think "the") most crowded train lines in Japan ("crowded" meaning "high-density of people in each train car"). One reason for this is that other major JR lines heading out of central Tokyo (Tokaido Line, Joban Line, Sobu Line [to Chiba]) have fifteen-car trains, but the Chuo Line is limited to just ten due to the length of its unexpandable platforms within central Tokyo. They try to make up for it by running a lot of trains, but still, the Chuo Line is basically crowded any time of the day or night. There is also the fact that the Chuo Line is a long line, with many stations in highly-populated areas, so it's not only crowded in one direction in the morning (and in the opposite direction in the evening), but rather in both directions - all the time.
"Competition for Misery" might be a good title to describe how Tokyo residents endlessly claim that their own train line is "definitely the most crowded line in Tokyo". I've heard this claim for just about every line here! The Odakyu Line, the Tozai Line, The Seibu-Ikebukuro Line (of "Actually Full Train" fame), the Chuo Line, etc. etc. The thing to keep in mind here is that most people are focusing on the morning rush, and once you're at the point where people have to force their way aboard, the density per train car is only limited by the particular size of the passengers at the time (and place), plus their strength and will to get on. (More diminutive people can fit into a given space, but larger people also push harder, so maximum density would likely be achieved with diminutive people getting on first, and then large, strong people providing compacting power at the doors just before they close.) The Chuo Line is distinctive for having a very high (the highest I think) density *on average* for *the entire day*. A lot of lines will be quite intense in the morning crush-rush, but then have several empty seats just a few hours later.
June, 2009... companies are beginning to cancel flex time!!! This can only mean that the morning trains will be more highly packed. Maybe the scene in "Actually Full Train in 1991 - Why Flex-Time is a Good Idea" isn't just a scene from the past after all! (Shudder!!!)
"Excesses During the Bubble Years"
Just when I was getting used to watching my 1991 videos and thinking: "The 'bubble years'! Not the 'excess-of-everything' that people think!", I stumbled upon myself visiting a new public restroom near Sumida River in July 1991. It was in a building worthy of something nice (not sure what), had a fountain(!) just inside the main entrance, music playing on a PA system, and was squeaky-clean:
I suppose this is probably an example of "bubble-era excess".
4:45 a.m. Ouch. I need to get some sleep!
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
This was taken in the early evening on a weekday, just before the evening crush rush got into high gear. The Chuo Line is the (or "one-of-the", but I think "the") most crowded train lines in Japan ("crowded" meaning "high-density of people in each train car"). One reason for this is that other major JR lines heading out of central Tokyo (Tokaido Line, Joban Line, Sobu Line [to Chiba]) have fifteen-car trains, but the Chuo Line is limited to just ten due to the length of its unexpandable platforms within central Tokyo. They try to make up for it by running a lot of trains, but still, the Chuo Line is basically crowded any time of the day or night. There is also the fact that the Chuo Line is a long line, with many stations in highly-populated areas, so it's not only crowded in one direction in the morning (and in the opposite direction in the evening), but rather in both directions - all the time.
"Competition for Misery" might be a good title to describe how Tokyo residents endlessly claim that their own train line is "definitely the most crowded line in Tokyo". I've heard this claim for just about every line here! The Odakyu Line, the Tozai Line, The Seibu-Ikebukuro Line (of "Actually Full Train" fame), the Chuo Line, etc. etc. The thing to keep in mind here is that most people are focusing on the morning rush, and once you're at the point where people have to force their way aboard, the density per train car is only limited by the particular size of the passengers at the time (and place), plus their strength and will to get on. (More diminutive people can fit into a given space, but larger people also push harder, so maximum density would likely be achieved with diminutive people getting on first, and then large, strong people providing compacting power at the doors just before they close.) The Chuo Line is distinctive for having a very high (the highest I think) density *on average* for *the entire day*. A lot of lines will be quite intense in the morning crush-rush, but then have several empty seats just a few hours later.
June, 2009... companies are beginning to cancel flex time!!! This can only mean that the morning trains will be more highly packed. Maybe the scene in "Actually Full Train in 1991 - Why Flex-Time is a Good Idea" isn't just a scene from the past after all! (Shudder!!!)
"Excesses During the Bubble Years"
Just when I was getting used to watching my 1991 videos and thinking: "The 'bubble years'! Not the 'excess-of-everything' that people think!", I stumbled upon myself visiting a new public restroom near Sumida River in July 1991. It was in a building worthy of something nice (not sure what), had a fountain(!) just inside the main entrance, music playing on a PA system, and was squeaky-clean:
I suppose this is probably an example of "bubble-era excess".
4:45 a.m. Ouch. I need to get some sleep!
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Sunday, June 21, 2009
"Sumida River Boats & Prelude to 1991 Full Train"
Another video trip back to 1991 - to July 6th, when I wandered around in an area along the Sumida River that had been recently largely rebuilt with new office buildings. Pleasure boats motor past on the river and there are a couple of old steel bridges from different eras that find their way through the lens. Since it was Saturday, the area was nearly deserted. The new buildings are in the 10-15 story range, a size that took less time, planning, and money to put up than the 50-story high-rises that were planned then (in the bubble years), but not completed for another decade.
This was at the tail end of the bubble economy, and when looking back to that era now, people often fail to realize that while the many 50-story category high-rise buildings now scattered about Tokyo were *planned* in the bubble years, at the time, they were busier knocking down old buildings to make way to the huge new ones. There is always holdover from one era to another, and there was holdover from the wooden era in 1991, as there is holdover from the bubble era in 2009, and yet there is this image of everything being new in the bubble years, which was not the case.
Just Another Day in February 1991
The train video - again! I'm almost embarrassed to post yet another variation of this, but it has been stolen and copied all over the Internet with lying titles, and so I wanted to show the normalcy of people going through the ticket barrier, walking down the stairs to the platform, walking along the platform, waiting for the train, etc. Certainly the moment of loading is pretty intense, but many people misunderstand the overall situation and the context of the whole thing, or the fact that it was taken in 1991 - it's not nearly as crowded in 2009 (increased number of trains, increased connections with the subway system, etc.). Also the population of Tokyo should never be forgotten - 30,000,000 people if you include the suburbs of Kanagawa, Saitama, and Chiba. Anyway, here is the video, a longer version of the many-million-seen copied-everywhere train video currently all over the Internet:
Some facts about the video. Taken in February 1991 at around 7:50 a.m., at Hibarigaoka Station on the Seibu-Ikebukuro Line. The train on the right is a "junkyu" ("limited express" in US English), and the train on the left is a "kyuko" ("express" in any kind of English that I'm aware of). Notice how I walk (with the video camera rolling) to the very front of the platform? The front of the Seibu-Ikebukuro Line trains is closest to connections with other train lines, so that's where people need to be if they're going to make tight connections, and they can't afford to waste any time. The next station (that the express stops at) is Shakuji-koen, and then the train goes all the way to the terminus at Ikebukuro, where everyone gets off.
And... that's basically it.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
This was at the tail end of the bubble economy, and when looking back to that era now, people often fail to realize that while the many 50-story category high-rise buildings now scattered about Tokyo were *planned* in the bubble years, at the time, they were busier knocking down old buildings to make way to the huge new ones. There is always holdover from one era to another, and there was holdover from the wooden era in 1991, as there is holdover from the bubble era in 2009, and yet there is this image of everything being new in the bubble years, which was not the case.
Just Another Day in February 1991
The train video - again! I'm almost embarrassed to post yet another variation of this, but it has been stolen and copied all over the Internet with lying titles, and so I wanted to show the normalcy of people going through the ticket barrier, walking down the stairs to the platform, walking along the platform, waiting for the train, etc. Certainly the moment of loading is pretty intense, but many people misunderstand the overall situation and the context of the whole thing, or the fact that it was taken in 1991 - it's not nearly as crowded in 2009 (increased number of trains, increased connections with the subway system, etc.). Also the population of Tokyo should never be forgotten - 30,000,000 people if you include the suburbs of Kanagawa, Saitama, and Chiba. Anyway, here is the video, a longer version of the many-million-seen copied-everywhere train video currently all over the Internet:
Some facts about the video. Taken in February 1991 at around 7:50 a.m., at Hibarigaoka Station on the Seibu-Ikebukuro Line. The train on the right is a "junkyu" ("limited express" in US English), and the train on the left is a "kyuko" ("express" in any kind of English that I'm aware of). Notice how I walk (with the video camera rolling) to the very front of the platform? The front of the Seibu-Ikebukuro Line trains is closest to connections with other train lines, so that's where people need to be if they're going to make tight connections, and they can't afford to waste any time. The next station (that the express stops at) is Shakuji-koen, and then the train goes all the way to the terminus at Ikebukuro, where everyone gets off.
And... that's basically it.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Thursday, June 18, 2009
"Togoshi-Ginza & the Grocery Store Under Hachiko"
The name Togoshi-Ginza can be confusing, as it is not in Ginza, or even near Ginza, but rather one of the old-style shopping streets that used to be all over Tokyo and its surrounding suburbs. They are in decline now, with more people shopping at large discount stores, but some of these old style shopping streets are still doing relatively well, with locals happy for the convenience of being able to shop a few minutes (on foot) from home. As "Ginza" was synonymous with "shopping" (now "fashion" and "art" would be better key words), some shopping streets used the name - thus "Warabi-Ginza", "Togoshi-Ginza", etc. This video was taken around 5:00 p.m., still a little early - it gets more crowded around 6:00 p.m.
Under Hachiko?
Department stores in Tokyo typically have a grocery store and/or food section on the B1 level underground (usually there is both a section selling prepared food and another section more like a regular grocery store). Shibuya is "Tokyu Town" (spelled with a "u" on the end, not "Tokyo"), with Tokyu Department stores (plural), Tokyu Inn (hotel), Tokyu trains, Tokyu buses, Tokyu Taxis, etc. So there's no surprise that the Department stores built over and around Shibuya Station are Tokyu department stores, and it's no surprise that they have food sections in the basement. What surprised me (for what reason, I'm not sure), is that part of the food section is beneath (part of ) the Hachiko Plaza. I guess I've visualized building basements as staying within the walls of the building above, but when you've got underground shopping malls and underground trains, it's easy enough to connect things underground.
This video starts with a view of an old Tokyu train car that is now sitting in Hachiko Plaza not far from the famous Hachiko dog statue. There is a brief view of a Yamanote Line train passing, some people waiting, leaning against one of the round sort-of-seats that are part of the large planters for the trees in the plaza, and then the trip through the crowd to the department store, down an escalator, and into the food section. The last scene is back out on the street on the other side of the overhead(!) Ginza subway tracks. (The Ginza Line runs below ground level everywhere but in Shibuya.)
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Under Hachiko?
Department stores in Tokyo typically have a grocery store and/or food section on the B1 level underground (usually there is both a section selling prepared food and another section more like a regular grocery store). Shibuya is "Tokyu Town" (spelled with a "u" on the end, not "Tokyo"), with Tokyu Department stores (plural), Tokyu Inn (hotel), Tokyu trains, Tokyu buses, Tokyu Taxis, etc. So there's no surprise that the Department stores built over and around Shibuya Station are Tokyu department stores, and it's no surprise that they have food sections in the basement. What surprised me (for what reason, I'm not sure), is that part of the food section is beneath (part of ) the Hachiko Plaza. I guess I've visualized building basements as staying within the walls of the building above, but when you've got underground shopping malls and underground trains, it's easy enough to connect things underground.
This video starts with a view of an old Tokyu train car that is now sitting in Hachiko Plaza not far from the famous Hachiko dog statue. There is a brief view of a Yamanote Line train passing, some people waiting, leaning against one of the round sort-of-seats that are part of the large planters for the trees in the plaza, and then the trip through the crowd to the department store, down an escalator, and into the food section. The last scene is back out on the street on the other side of the overhead(!) Ginza subway tracks. (The Ginza Line runs below ground level everywhere but in Shibuya.)
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Friday, June 12, 2009
"Roaring Office Voices & Whispering Trains..."
An amazing thing I've noticed at some offices I've worked at in Japan (is this similar elsewhere, or peculiar to this country?) is how there seems to be a general awareness and appreciation of a graphic artist's need for a relatively quiet workspace in which to properly concentrate on their work, but this professional courtesy does not extend to writing and translating! And so you will find a special floor with quiet music and no talking where a group of graphic artists go about their work - some with earphones in to listen to something other than the quiet background music - and on another floor of the same building, the same company will seat a translator and/or writer next to sales and service people, who are constantly talking on the phone or to each other (or to themselves - I wish I were making this up) in very loud voices. If said writer/translator attempts to block out the extraordinarily irritating surrounding noises by plugging in earphones with noise-blocking music or wildlife sounds, more often than not they will receive a reprimand from their supervisor and possible threat of being thrown out on the street for being unprofessional! (Keep in mind that most offices here have no partitions, so everyone can see everyone else.)
Why this respect for hand-drawn visual images, and yet complete lack of respect for quality text? I suppose that since the sales and service people couldn't draw a passable picture to save their lives, but can write (very badly, generally, but certainly they are not stone-dead illiterate), they equate their own mindless, sloppy writing with the work the professional writers/translators are doing? Or is it just a failure of management to find humane seating for people who actually need to concentrate on their work, as opposed to people who need to play office games and back-stabbing office jungle warfare?
And so a poor soul can be suffering appalling audio conditions at work while writing - struggling through secretaries who talk needlessly to themselves, service/sales people who talk so loudly on the phone that you wonder if they think their voice needs to carry over to the next city (or country) on the strength of loudness alone, without the electronic aid of the newfangled devices known as microphones and speakers in the communication device they have in their hands - and when said writer goes out and waits for a train with a stress level that is likely to kill their overstressed heart, the train comes in not with a roar, but a whisper. How loud that vapid secretary's muttering! How quiet the roaring/rushing train!
Of course none of this has anything to do with my own work environment, which is wonderful-wonderful-wonderful, but here's a video of a whispering, not roaring train:
Details: This video is of a Shinjuku/Ikebukuro-bound Yamanote Line train coming into Shibuya Station. It looks like a subway, but the entire Yamanote Line is an elevated system, and this effect is created at stations where they have built large buildings over the station, in this case a Tokyu Department Store. So you can get off of this train in the middle, walk straight out the ticket gates (there are stairs going up or down to other exits as well), and then walk over and get in a department store elevator at the second floor. (This only works for the Shinjuku/Ikebukuro-bound trains however - the Shinagawa/Tokyo-bound trains require going up or down to get around the intervening rails.)
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Why this respect for hand-drawn visual images, and yet complete lack of respect for quality text? I suppose that since the sales and service people couldn't draw a passable picture to save their lives, but can write (very badly, generally, but certainly they are not stone-dead illiterate), they equate their own mindless, sloppy writing with the work the professional writers/translators are doing? Or is it just a failure of management to find humane seating for people who actually need to concentrate on their work, as opposed to people who need to play office games and back-stabbing office jungle warfare?
And so a poor soul can be suffering appalling audio conditions at work while writing - struggling through secretaries who talk needlessly to themselves, service/sales people who talk so loudly on the phone that you wonder if they think their voice needs to carry over to the next city (or country) on the strength of loudness alone, without the electronic aid of the newfangled devices known as microphones and speakers in the communication device they have in their hands - and when said writer goes out and waits for a train with a stress level that is likely to kill their overstressed heart, the train comes in not with a roar, but a whisper. How loud that vapid secretary's muttering! How quiet the roaring/rushing train!
Of course none of this has anything to do with my own work environment, which is wonderful-wonderful-wonderful, but here's a video of a whispering, not roaring train:
Details: This video is of a Shinjuku/Ikebukuro-bound Yamanote Line train coming into Shibuya Station. It looks like a subway, but the entire Yamanote Line is an elevated system, and this effect is created at stations where they have built large buildings over the station, in this case a Tokyu Department Store. So you can get off of this train in the middle, walk straight out the ticket gates (there are stairs going up or down to other exits as well), and then walk over and get in a department store elevator at the second floor. (This only works for the Shinjuku/Ikebukuro-bound trains however - the Shinagawa/Tokyo-bound trains require going up or down to get around the intervening rails.)
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Monday, June 08, 2009
"Often Not Subtle"
What prompts this title? 1) Think "Subtle Japan" - if you've read a few books on Japan, you've probably run into that concept somewhere. 2) Think Canadian/Hokkaido winter temperatures in the summer - via overusing air-conditioners in the late 1980's. 3) Think Sub-Saharan heat in the winter - via overuse of heating and windows that are never opened in the years 2008 & 2009.
Now, before I get into high gear with my rant against wild misuse (& non-use) of thermostats in this city, allow me to say that there are indeed subtle aspects to the culture (as there are anywhere, really). Okay - here goes:
There is almost always some context for the way people behave/misbehave, and the background to common overuse of air-conditioning in the late eighties here was that a lot of people had grown up with no air-conditioning, and had unpleasant memories of hot sticky days in August wishing it were cooler. Along came air-conditioning, and suddenly those August dreams of winter Hokkaido breezes were realizable by dialing the temperature way (or all) the way down.
Into this environment I flew in 1984, and I listened in sympathy to women office workers saying how they suffered in the cold - how it was unfair that the men stayed in suits and cooled the air to the point where it was cool with a suit jacket still on.
Jump forward to 2008 & 2009 and - based on the offices I've been spending some time in - things have come full circle. A generation has grown up disliking overuse of air-conditioning; and recently, instead of the offices always being cool, now they tend to always be hot. For the past couple of years, I have found myself nodding in sympathy with people in thin clothing (of both genders, but most often male) fanning themselves in 29C/85F heat, bemoaning the fact that a handful of sickly people (of both genders, but most often female) in the office have hijacked the thermostats and there is nothing to do but suffer the daily purgatory of working in a constant 29C/85F heat - all year round, in winter and summer.
In winter, when questioned why company policy about not wasting energy is being violated to overheat the office, the excuse is that "Some people are cold", meaning that if it drops down to about 27C, some sickly people begin to complain of imminent frostbite. Come summer, suddenly the energy savings is very important - never mind that a majority of the people in the office are baking in the 29C/85F heat.
The thing that's quite irritating about how this issue is discussed here, is that people only say what their perceptions are, and the science of monitoring the actual temperature of the room to ascertain what temperatures are producing what reactions in what percentage of people, is almost completely ignored. Wanting to know exactly what's happening myself, I've been using thermometers (more than one, so I know the device isn't broken) to monitor the temperatures of some of the purgatories I visit, and that 29C/85F temperature is no joke - it's actually that hot.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this situation, except to shake my head in wonder and think "There's nothing subtle about this! These are fairly radical group reactions to something that should be dealt with incrementally!".
Rant... um... over for now.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Now, before I get into high gear with my rant against wild misuse (& non-use) of thermostats in this city, allow me to say that there are indeed subtle aspects to the culture (as there are anywhere, really). Okay - here goes:
There is almost always some context for the way people behave/misbehave, and the background to common overuse of air-conditioning in the late eighties here was that a lot of people had grown up with no air-conditioning, and had unpleasant memories of hot sticky days in August wishing it were cooler. Along came air-conditioning, and suddenly those August dreams of winter Hokkaido breezes were realizable by dialing the temperature way (or all) the way down.
Into this environment I flew in 1984, and I listened in sympathy to women office workers saying how they suffered in the cold - how it was unfair that the men stayed in suits and cooled the air to the point where it was cool with a suit jacket still on.
Jump forward to 2008 & 2009 and - based on the offices I've been spending some time in - things have come full circle. A generation has grown up disliking overuse of air-conditioning; and recently, instead of the offices always being cool, now they tend to always be hot. For the past couple of years, I have found myself nodding in sympathy with people in thin clothing (of both genders, but most often male) fanning themselves in 29C/85F heat, bemoaning the fact that a handful of sickly people (of both genders, but most often female) in the office have hijacked the thermostats and there is nothing to do but suffer the daily purgatory of working in a constant 29C/85F heat - all year round, in winter and summer.
In winter, when questioned why company policy about not wasting energy is being violated to overheat the office, the excuse is that "Some people are cold", meaning that if it drops down to about 27C, some sickly people begin to complain of imminent frostbite. Come summer, suddenly the energy savings is very important - never mind that a majority of the people in the office are baking in the 29C/85F heat.
The thing that's quite irritating about how this issue is discussed here, is that people only say what their perceptions are, and the science of monitoring the actual temperature of the room to ascertain what temperatures are producing what reactions in what percentage of people, is almost completely ignored. Wanting to know exactly what's happening myself, I've been using thermometers (more than one, so I know the device isn't broken) to monitor the temperatures of some of the purgatories I visit, and that 29C/85F temperature is no joke - it's actually that hot.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this situation, except to shake my head in wonder and think "There's nothing subtle about this! These are fairly radical group reactions to something that should be dealt with incrementally!".
Rant... um... over for now.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Sunday, May 31, 2009
"Train Culture vs. Car Culture"
I've had the concept of "car culture" in mind for decades now, but life without cars is generally referred to under the category of "public transportation". But there's a culture to city rail travel as well (and you don't hear the term "private transportation" so much for ordinary car ownership, come to think of it - or do you? Is that a popular term?). I've been living in train culture, feeling the situation and ambiance of it, but it was only yesterday, while viewing video footage I took in 1991 (including a lot of train views and sounds), that the concept jelled and I realized that the term "train culture" really ought to be in common use, just as "car culture" is.
The intricacies of this are hard to pin down, but the main factor is having a city (Tokyo in this case) functioning with virtually no one really needing cars, so a lot of people don't own a car, and a number of fundamental things are different than they are for those living in car culture cities:
Young job-seekers are not asked if they have a car on application forms - it's understood that they will be commuting to work via train, and employers pay the train fee (which might be a law here - I'm not sure). In fact, if an employee were stupid enough to try driving to work, the company would forbid them from using the company parking lot (which only has a limited number of spaces for deliveries, taxis, and executive management - if it has any parking at all). Not only would they not be able to park at the company, it would be illegal to just park their car on a nearby street, so they would have to spend something like Y50,000 a month on a parking space possibly a twenty minute walk from the company. And - to top all of that off, it would take them from three to five times as long to get to work as it takes to get there by train (for those living in the 'burbs that is, it wouldn't be as bad if they lived fairly near the company). (No one pressing up against you in a car, but hours in a traffic jam every morning is no picnic either.) Since coming to work by car would be abnormal and anti-social behavior, being late due to traffic would not be considered a legitimate excuse. Someone committing suicide on your line is a perfectly acceptable excuse however, and carries the benefit of being verifiable and shared by thousands (misery loves company...).
High school couples who meet for a date are not concerned with what kind of car each other has (since neither of them has one), so they don't waste money and time on fire-breathing machinery acquisition & maintenance. Rich kids can't drive to the date in a BMW, and poor kids have nothing to feel ashamed about in the form of driving a piece of junk. It's a more level playing field. (Granted, people find other ways to vertically position people, but that's beyond the scope of this particular page of text.)
Car-owning high school students are not forced to work late at night at restaurant jobs to pay for gas and car parts for their old clunkers.
When you meet people, parking is not an issue, since everyone comes by train.
If you buy something, you have to carry it home (or have it trucked), so shopping becomes a logistical issue of how much you can carry (this is one of the things I most miss about cars - not being able to toss things in the trunk!). Second to how much you can carry, is the issue of what time you plan to carry it home on the trains. If you have an armload of boxes, the last express for the day, leaving at 12:10 a.m. is going to be a problem. When you have to force just yourself onto a train, having things with you can be tricky. You have to hold them over your head and then toss them onto a rack in the train. That may not sound very difficult, but there is no guarantee that you can get anywhere near a rack, and even if you can, it might already be jam-packed full.
When cars are vandalized in your apartment building parking lot (which only has enough [expensive, by the way] spaces for about 20% of the apartments, and still there are some vacant slots), you of course are irritated by the concept of some idiot going out and damaging other people's property for no good reason, but not owning a car, you are immune to car vandalism (bicycles are another issue, but the financial exposure is much less).
When - and this is peculiar to Japan I think - the entire train system completely shuts down every night between 12:00 - 1:00 a.m. (depending on the line and the station on the line), not to start up again until around 5:00 a.m., the looming deadline of "last train" is a wonderful way to escape either overtime going on endlessly, or situations and/or people that you've had enough of. You can even adjust the time somewhat by claiming distant connections that require leaving by 10:30 p.m., etc. Going the other way, a couple that want to spend more time together can conveniently miss their last trains, thereby gaining an extra five hours together before the train system comes back to life in the morning. (Taxis are not a - cost wise - realistic option if you live outside the central area.)
Etc. etc. That's all that is coming to mind right now, but in any case, suffice it to say that going everywhere by train is a fairly radically different way of living than going everywhere by personal car.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
The intricacies of this are hard to pin down, but the main factor is having a city (Tokyo in this case) functioning with virtually no one really needing cars, so a lot of people don't own a car, and a number of fundamental things are different than they are for those living in car culture cities:
Young job-seekers are not asked if they have a car on application forms - it's understood that they will be commuting to work via train, and employers pay the train fee (which might be a law here - I'm not sure). In fact, if an employee were stupid enough to try driving to work, the company would forbid them from using the company parking lot (which only has a limited number of spaces for deliveries, taxis, and executive management - if it has any parking at all). Not only would they not be able to park at the company, it would be illegal to just park their car on a nearby street, so they would have to spend something like Y50,000 a month on a parking space possibly a twenty minute walk from the company. And - to top all of that off, it would take them from three to five times as long to get to work as it takes to get there by train (for those living in the 'burbs that is, it wouldn't be as bad if they lived fairly near the company). (No one pressing up against you in a car, but hours in a traffic jam every morning is no picnic either.) Since coming to work by car would be abnormal and anti-social behavior, being late due to traffic would not be considered a legitimate excuse. Someone committing suicide on your line is a perfectly acceptable excuse however, and carries the benefit of being verifiable and shared by thousands (misery loves company...).
High school couples who meet for a date are not concerned with what kind of car each other has (since neither of them has one), so they don't waste money and time on fire-breathing machinery acquisition & maintenance. Rich kids can't drive to the date in a BMW, and poor kids have nothing to feel ashamed about in the form of driving a piece of junk. It's a more level playing field. (Granted, people find other ways to vertically position people, but that's beyond the scope of this particular page of text.)
Car-owning high school students are not forced to work late at night at restaurant jobs to pay for gas and car parts for their old clunkers.
When you meet people, parking is not an issue, since everyone comes by train.
If you buy something, you have to carry it home (or have it trucked), so shopping becomes a logistical issue of how much you can carry (this is one of the things I most miss about cars - not being able to toss things in the trunk!). Second to how much you can carry, is the issue of what time you plan to carry it home on the trains. If you have an armload of boxes, the last express for the day, leaving at 12:10 a.m. is going to be a problem. When you have to force just yourself onto a train, having things with you can be tricky. You have to hold them over your head and then toss them onto a rack in the train. That may not sound very difficult, but there is no guarantee that you can get anywhere near a rack, and even if you can, it might already be jam-packed full.
When cars are vandalized in your apartment building parking lot (which only has enough [expensive, by the way] spaces for about 20% of the apartments, and still there are some vacant slots), you of course are irritated by the concept of some idiot going out and damaging other people's property for no good reason, but not owning a car, you are immune to car vandalism (bicycles are another issue, but the financial exposure is much less).
When - and this is peculiar to Japan I think - the entire train system completely shuts down every night between 12:00 - 1:00 a.m. (depending on the line and the station on the line), not to start up again until around 5:00 a.m., the looming deadline of "last train" is a wonderful way to escape either overtime going on endlessly, or situations and/or people that you've had enough of. You can even adjust the time somewhat by claiming distant connections that require leaving by 10:30 p.m., etc. Going the other way, a couple that want to spend more time together can conveniently miss their last trains, thereby gaining an extra five hours together before the train system comes back to life in the morning. (Taxis are not a - cost wise - realistic option if you live outside the central area.)
Etc. etc. That's all that is coming to mind right now, but in any case, suffice it to say that going everywhere by train is a fairly radically different way of living than going everywhere by personal car.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Sunday, May 24, 2009
"Hibarigaoka to Ikebukuro - March 1991"
The following is an explanation (director's comments I guess you could say) about my video: "From Hibarigaoka to Ikebukuro via Seibu-Ikebukuro Line - March 1991"
The following times are taken from an internal video player application playing the source file, and not from the YouTube posting, but presumably the counts are identical:
00:00 - Narrow lane leading to the north entrance of Hibarigaoka Station.
00:03 - After crossing over the tracks, a left turn leads to the main entrance to the station and the bus stops, with a Seiyu department store on the right. (In Japanese-English, the word "department" only refers to upscale department stores, so locally, the Seiyu didn't qualify as a "department" store. I've had arguments about this in the past here, telling people that I understand their position in Japanese but in English, it was certainly a department store.) Notice the McDonald's on the right. It was inside a building that (I was told at the time) used to be a grocery store. Soon after this video was taken, they tore down all the buildings on the right and put up a large combination apartment building / Parco department store (with McDonald's and KFC on the ground floor). Now everything in this view is in Nishi-Tokyo-shi, but at the time, the right and left were Hoya-shi and the middle section Tanashi-shi (shi = city).
00:05 - The station building was rebuilt, so the area on the left has changed, and the empty sky straight ahead and to the right is now occupied by a huge apartment high-rise building ("mansion" in Japanese-English).
00:10 - Taking video inside an ATM box - I wouldn't do that now, but the world was less obsessed with security in 1991.
00:27 - Inside Hibarigaoka Station. This is completely different now. Comparing how it looks now with this video, this scene looks really old. At the time, I never thought the station was modern, but it didn't strike me as being profoundly old either. I look at that picture now and have a hard time bringing up a memory of it as something from the present day.
00:28 - Stairs... these have been replaced with escalators. Sometimes I hate escalators at stations, because they narrow the available space for going up and down and create bottlenecks that can make you miss a tight transfer.
00:41 - The live announcement - made by the conductor. They now have recorded announcements that are generally irritating to listen to - especially the one-third speed, overly pronounced & overly intonated English. I really wish they'd drop the English announcements (a station name is a station name, non-Japanese speakers don't need to hear "The next station is..."), and go back to having a real live human being make the announcements. Even when the announcement isn't irritating (which it usually is), hearing *exactly* the same recording over and over and over is really... inhumane.
00:55 - Two things - the announcement going on and on for a bit. Okay - after my rant above, I can see where this would confuse a tourist, but all he's doing is rattling off the many stations that the train (an express) will not be stopping at, and telling people they will need to transfer to a local train at the next station if they are headed to those stations. A tourist might mistakenly go to the end of the line, but so what? They can get a train going back the other direction and have an interesting tale to tell of getting lost on the train system when they get back to their home country. Most importantly, 99.99% of the passengers, who use the train all the time, don't have to have their ears assaulted with inane and endlessly repeating recordings.
The other thing is the farmland. Until quite recently (and even now somewhat), there have been small plots of land being used as farmland just outside the central area of Tokyo.
01:07 - Billboards. In 1991, these were full of advertisements. When I revisited this area a few years ago, most of the billboards were blank.
01:19 - The noise of going over merging rails. The old trains didn't have any kind of insulation at all, I don't think. The new ones must have, as they're quite a bit less noisy. With the old trains, you could hear (and feel - via leaky window frames) everything (which is not necessarily a bad thing - you feel more like you're on a train journey and less like you're locked into a suffocating box awaiting your return to freedom when the stuffy box finally gets to your station).
01:30 - More billboards. These were looking very forlorn a few years ago when I saw them with no advertisements on them. And then the view inside. This was taken in the late afternoon, heading into central Tokyo. It should go without saying, but obviously (most) lines are not crowded all the time, and it's possible to sit down if you're outside the office-drone routine. This is the very same line that the "Actually Full Train in 1991" video was taken of. This very same train car in the morning (or one just like it) was a sardine holder containing something like 300 people-as-sardines (x10 for a ten car train).
01:32 - A new apartment building. This is a fairly common design, although new apartment buildings being put up in 2009 are usually sleeker looking.
01:40 - Looking over new elevated track construction from the one small bit of elevated track at the time. The Seibu-Ikebukuro Line was very slow to implement new track construction, which is one reason the morning trains were so vastly overcrowded at the time.
01:52 - Passing through a local station and past small shops near the station. For the feel of the train, it was more interesting when it ran on the ground. This part is elevated now and it cuts the train off from the area it passes through. (That is by no means a call to run them on the ground though. Putting them overhead separates them from traffic and is safer, faster, etc., not to mention the view is better if the buildings are right up against the railway.)
02:01 - The Seibu-Toshima Line merging with the Seibu-Ikebukuro Line. All of this is elevated now.
02:25 - Early construction on what was to become the new (large), Nerima Station... I think. Certainly the current Nerima Station is huge compared to before, but this might have been construction a little further down the line - as a whole section of the railway was elevated. (Sorry for the imprecision here, but the camera I was using at the time didn't have time code and I took this footage 18 years ago.)
02:37 - Passing over a fairly rare freight train and, in the background on the left, the new Tobu Department Store under construction. It was a bit of a big deal at the time, as the new construction was to give Tobu Department Store more floor space than its rival on the other side of the station, Seibu Department Store.
02:39 - Wooden ties - rare even in 1991, in Tokyo they are nonexistent on anything except defunct sidings (as this picture is of), although (I think) they still exist out in the countryside on some branch lines.
02:43 - The old three-door Seibu-Ikebukuro Line trains. These have been almost completely replaced with newer four-door (per side) train cars (carriages). It should be noted that one cause of the loading problem in the "Actually Full Train in 1991" is that there were only three doors. The more doors you have per side, the easier loading is. On the Yamanote Line they have a few cars with six doors per side and seats that are folded up in the morning, making for speedy unloading, loading, and maximum carrying capacity. (The advantage to three-door trains of course being that more people can sit down per train car.)
03:34 - Manual ticket gate. One advantage to a manual ticket gate, is that if you've got too small of a ticket (in value that is), you can pay the extra bit right at the ticket gate. With the machines, you get an error and have to walk over to an Add-Fare machine. Incidentally, in contrast to what some illegally posted copies of my "Actually Full Train in 1991" video say, this man is *not* a police officer! This the uniform of the Seibu Railway employees at the time. (I think they've changed the style a little since then, but I'm not sure - I don't use this line very often any more.)
03:41 - Out into the big city. Hibarigaoka is also in Tokyo, but in one of its suburbs. Things are a bit busier around the Yamanote Line hub stations - like Ikebukuro, Shinjuku, Ueno, Shibuya, Shinagawa, Tokyo, etc.
Phew! It's always a bit surprising/irritating to realize how long it takes to explain what's in a video! Especially when it concerns scenes lasting all of two or three seconds. Look at all that text above! But if the calculation of "a picture is worth a thousand words" is taken into account, then a 4:46 video would come to 8,580,000 words (286 seconds x 30-pictures per second = 8,580 pictures x 1,000), so I guess this isn't so long after all? There's the overlap of many pictures being similar, but on the other hand, there's the sound, which would require another large block of text to properly explain. So much information in a video....
Ah! One last comment! It seems to be standard practice to put in fake sound effects for any "documentary" footage of anything, taken at any time if the real sounds are not recorded, or are unpleasing. I really abhor this dishonest practice! In fiction, why not, but for documentary footage, it amounts to bad virus code going into people's minds regarding how things sound, since more often than not, the sounds are inaccurate. This has come home to me when watching these videos, as not only the sights of Tokyo have changed, but so have the sounds! Okay. Mini-rant over.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
The following times are taken from an internal video player application playing the source file, and not from the YouTube posting, but presumably the counts are identical:
00:00 - Narrow lane leading to the north entrance of Hibarigaoka Station.
00:03 - After crossing over the tracks, a left turn leads to the main entrance to the station and the bus stops, with a Seiyu department store on the right. (In Japanese-English, the word "department" only refers to upscale department stores, so locally, the Seiyu didn't qualify as a "department" store. I've had arguments about this in the past here, telling people that I understand their position in Japanese but in English, it was certainly a department store.) Notice the McDonald's on the right. It was inside a building that (I was told at the time) used to be a grocery store. Soon after this video was taken, they tore down all the buildings on the right and put up a large combination apartment building / Parco department store (with McDonald's and KFC on the ground floor). Now everything in this view is in Nishi-Tokyo-shi, but at the time, the right and left were Hoya-shi and the middle section Tanashi-shi (shi = city).
00:05 - The station building was rebuilt, so the area on the left has changed, and the empty sky straight ahead and to the right is now occupied by a huge apartment high-rise building ("mansion" in Japanese-English).
00:10 - Taking video inside an ATM box - I wouldn't do that now, but the world was less obsessed with security in 1991.
00:27 - Inside Hibarigaoka Station. This is completely different now. Comparing how it looks now with this video, this scene looks really old. At the time, I never thought the station was modern, but it didn't strike me as being profoundly old either. I look at that picture now and have a hard time bringing up a memory of it as something from the present day.
00:28 - Stairs... these have been replaced with escalators. Sometimes I hate escalators at stations, because they narrow the available space for going up and down and create bottlenecks that can make you miss a tight transfer.
00:41 - The live announcement - made by the conductor. They now have recorded announcements that are generally irritating to listen to - especially the one-third speed, overly pronounced & overly intonated English. I really wish they'd drop the English announcements (a station name is a station name, non-Japanese speakers don't need to hear "The next station is..."), and go back to having a real live human being make the announcements. Even when the announcement isn't irritating (which it usually is), hearing *exactly* the same recording over and over and over is really... inhumane.
00:55 - Two things - the announcement going on and on for a bit. Okay - after my rant above, I can see where this would confuse a tourist, but all he's doing is rattling off the many stations that the train (an express) will not be stopping at, and telling people they will need to transfer to a local train at the next station if they are headed to those stations. A tourist might mistakenly go to the end of the line, but so what? They can get a train going back the other direction and have an interesting tale to tell of getting lost on the train system when they get back to their home country. Most importantly, 99.99% of the passengers, who use the train all the time, don't have to have their ears assaulted with inane and endlessly repeating recordings.
The other thing is the farmland. Until quite recently (and even now somewhat), there have been small plots of land being used as farmland just outside the central area of Tokyo.
01:07 - Billboards. In 1991, these were full of advertisements. When I revisited this area a few years ago, most of the billboards were blank.
01:19 - The noise of going over merging rails. The old trains didn't have any kind of insulation at all, I don't think. The new ones must have, as they're quite a bit less noisy. With the old trains, you could hear (and feel - via leaky window frames) everything (which is not necessarily a bad thing - you feel more like you're on a train journey and less like you're locked into a suffocating box awaiting your return to freedom when the stuffy box finally gets to your station).
01:30 - More billboards. These were looking very forlorn a few years ago when I saw them with no advertisements on them. And then the view inside. This was taken in the late afternoon, heading into central Tokyo. It should go without saying, but obviously (most) lines are not crowded all the time, and it's possible to sit down if you're outside the office-drone routine. This is the very same line that the "Actually Full Train in 1991" video was taken of. This very same train car in the morning (or one just like it) was a sardine holder containing something like 300 people-as-sardines (x10 for a ten car train).
01:32 - A new apartment building. This is a fairly common design, although new apartment buildings being put up in 2009 are usually sleeker looking.
01:40 - Looking over new elevated track construction from the one small bit of elevated track at the time. The Seibu-Ikebukuro Line was very slow to implement new track construction, which is one reason the morning trains were so vastly overcrowded at the time.
01:52 - Passing through a local station and past small shops near the station. For the feel of the train, it was more interesting when it ran on the ground. This part is elevated now and it cuts the train off from the area it passes through. (That is by no means a call to run them on the ground though. Putting them overhead separates them from traffic and is safer, faster, etc., not to mention the view is better if the buildings are right up against the railway.)
02:01 - The Seibu-Toshima Line merging with the Seibu-Ikebukuro Line. All of this is elevated now.
02:25 - Early construction on what was to become the new (large), Nerima Station... I think. Certainly the current Nerima Station is huge compared to before, but this might have been construction a little further down the line - as a whole section of the railway was elevated. (Sorry for the imprecision here, but the camera I was using at the time didn't have time code and I took this footage 18 years ago.)
02:37 - Passing over a fairly rare freight train and, in the background on the left, the new Tobu Department Store under construction. It was a bit of a big deal at the time, as the new construction was to give Tobu Department Store more floor space than its rival on the other side of the station, Seibu Department Store.
02:39 - Wooden ties - rare even in 1991, in Tokyo they are nonexistent on anything except defunct sidings (as this picture is of), although (I think) they still exist out in the countryside on some branch lines.
02:43 - The old three-door Seibu-Ikebukuro Line trains. These have been almost completely replaced with newer four-door (per side) train cars (carriages). It should be noted that one cause of the loading problem in the "Actually Full Train in 1991" is that there were only three doors. The more doors you have per side, the easier loading is. On the Yamanote Line they have a few cars with six doors per side and seats that are folded up in the morning, making for speedy unloading, loading, and maximum carrying capacity. (The advantage to three-door trains of course being that more people can sit down per train car.)
03:34 - Manual ticket gate. One advantage to a manual ticket gate, is that if you've got too small of a ticket (in value that is), you can pay the extra bit right at the ticket gate. With the machines, you get an error and have to walk over to an Add-Fare machine. Incidentally, in contrast to what some illegally posted copies of my "Actually Full Train in 1991" video say, this man is *not* a police officer! This the uniform of the Seibu Railway employees at the time. (I think they've changed the style a little since then, but I'm not sure - I don't use this line very often any more.)
03:41 - Out into the big city. Hibarigaoka is also in Tokyo, but in one of its suburbs. Things are a bit busier around the Yamanote Line hub stations - like Ikebukuro, Shinjuku, Ueno, Shibuya, Shinagawa, Tokyo, etc.
Phew! It's always a bit surprising/irritating to realize how long it takes to explain what's in a video! Especially when it concerns scenes lasting all of two or three seconds. Look at all that text above! But if the calculation of "a picture is worth a thousand words" is taken into account, then a 4:46 video would come to 8,580,000 words (286 seconds x 30-pictures per second = 8,580 pictures x 1,000), so I guess this isn't so long after all? There's the overlap of many pictures being similar, but on the other hand, there's the sound, which would require another large block of text to properly explain. So much information in a video....
Ah! One last comment! It seems to be standard practice to put in fake sound effects for any "documentary" footage of anything, taken at any time if the real sounds are not recorded, or are unpleasing. I really abhor this dishonest practice! In fiction, why not, but for documentary footage, it amounts to bad virus code going into people's minds regarding how things sound, since more often than not, the sounds are inaccurate. This has come home to me when watching these videos, as not only the sights of Tokyo have changed, but so have the sounds! Okay. Mini-rant over.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
"'It's Like Disneyland!'"
On Friday, I met some friends in Yurakucho, and after socializing for a bit, we got to talking about old buildings in Tokyo, and how it was a shame there are so few of them. From there, I mentioned an interesting one I know of in Ginza, and it was decided that four of us would walk over to it, with me leading the way.
As we neared the building, I explained a bit about its history, and when we arrived in front of the building, I stopped everyone and pointed out some of the architectural details. (I'm not exactly an expert on Tokyo, but this particular building I've spent some time studying - via direct observation, talking to people who know its history, and reading about it, so I was the most knowledgeable one regarding the building in the group.)
With my pre-arrival tour guide functions fulfilled, I marched across the street, and held the door open for the other three. I introduced the elevator with its manually operated doors, and we went up into the building. As we walked down one of the old hallways, a woman in the group was visibly excited by the building, and looked at me with eyes sparkling and said "It's Like Disneyland!".
I was a bit taken aback, but as I looked into those sparkling eyes, I realized that she wasn't kidding - she really meant that it reminded her of Disneyland (quick note here - Tokyo Disneyland has been phenomenally successful ever since it opened in the early 1980's, and it's rare to find a Tokyo resident who hasn't been there at least once). During the tour of the building, she repeated that "It's like Disneyland!" phrase (well, actually, the Japanese equivalent: ディズニーランド見たい! [Dizunirando mitai!]) a few times, further burning that image into my brain, so I've been thinking of how that can be - how can an old, but honest building produce a strong feeling of being like Disneyland?
The answer is depressingly simple. Tokyo has had almost everything old in the city so successfully destroyed (intentionally; via earthquake; via external-origin bombs in WW-II; and then intentionally again), that the closest "exposure" (if you can call it that) someone in their twenties (or even thirties) has had to that middle ground between pre-technology eras and full-blown modern technological society, is the fake world built at Disneyland.
And that, I think very strongly underlines the importance of having at least some functioning old buildings preserved in a city. You walk into them and they positively radiate with the history of their existence. You can't get that with recreations and theme parks, no matter how well they are designed.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
As we neared the building, I explained a bit about its history, and when we arrived in front of the building, I stopped everyone and pointed out some of the architectural details. (I'm not exactly an expert on Tokyo, but this particular building I've spent some time studying - via direct observation, talking to people who know its history, and reading about it, so I was the most knowledgeable one regarding the building in the group.)
With my pre-arrival tour guide functions fulfilled, I marched across the street, and held the door open for the other three. I introduced the elevator with its manually operated doors, and we went up into the building. As we walked down one of the old hallways, a woman in the group was visibly excited by the building, and looked at me with eyes sparkling and said "It's Like Disneyland!".
I was a bit taken aback, but as I looked into those sparkling eyes, I realized that she wasn't kidding - she really meant that it reminded her of Disneyland (quick note here - Tokyo Disneyland has been phenomenally successful ever since it opened in the early 1980's, and it's rare to find a Tokyo resident who hasn't been there at least once). During the tour of the building, she repeated that "It's like Disneyland!" phrase (well, actually, the Japanese equivalent: ディズニーランド見たい! [Dizunirando mitai!]) a few times, further burning that image into my brain, so I've been thinking of how that can be - how can an old, but honest building produce a strong feeling of being like Disneyland?
The answer is depressingly simple. Tokyo has had almost everything old in the city so successfully destroyed (intentionally; via earthquake; via external-origin bombs in WW-II; and then intentionally again), that the closest "exposure" (if you can call it that) someone in their twenties (or even thirties) has had to that middle ground between pre-technology eras and full-blown modern technological society, is the fake world built at Disneyland.
And that, I think very strongly underlines the importance of having at least some functioning old buildings preserved in a city. You walk into them and they positively radiate with the history of their existence. You can't get that with recreations and theme parks, no matter how well they are designed.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Sunday, May 17, 2009
"Botchan - How Many Translations Are There?"
I was looking around on-line for the original Japanese text to Natsume Soseki's Botchan, when I came upon yet another translations of the book into English. About twenty years ago, I read two different English-language translations, one by a Japanese person and other by a foreigner, possibly American. I remember that, at the time, I thought the Japanese translation was the better of the two, as it retained more of the book's original ambiance, and the one done by a foreigner had been over-translated into an English-culture story, which it isn't. (Generally, it's a pretty good rule of thumb that a translation should be done by someone who is native to the target language, but in this case, it seemed to be the other way around.)
The new (compared to twenty years ago anyway, I think it came out a few years ago) translation seems to be fairly good (based on the first section of the book that I read), but I think it's not really possible to do the book real justice in any other language than the original Japanese. Translations change things, and the ambiance of the translated version is never quite the same as the original. The original (I think) translation by Yasotaro Morri (1919) explains this difficulty well in a forward to the book (just the first two paragraphs of the longer forward here):
A Note by the Translator
No translation can expect to equal, much less to excel, the original. The excellence of a translation can only be judged by noting how far it has succeeded in reproducing the original tone, colors, style, the delicacy of sentiment, the force of inert strength, the peculiar expressions native to the language with which the original is written, or whatever is its marked characteristic. The ablest can do no more, and to want more than this will be demanding something impossible. Strictly speaking, the only way one can derive full benefit or enjoyment from a foreign work is to read the original, for any intelligence at second-hand never gives the kind of satisfaction which is possible only through the direct touch with the original. Even in the best translated work is probably wanted the subtle vitality natural to the original language, for it defies an attempt, however elaborate, to transmit all there is in the original. Correctness of diction may be there, but spontaneity is gone; it cannot be helped.
The task of the translator becomes doubly hazardous in case of translating a European language into Japanese, or vice versa. Between any of the European languages and Japanese there is no visible kinship in word-form, significance, grammatical system, rhetorical arrangements. It may be said that the inspiration of the two languages is totally different. A want of similarity of customs, habits, traditions, national sentiments and traits makes the work of translation all the more difficult. A novel written in Japanese which had attained national popularity might, when rendered into English, lose its captivating vividness, alluring interest and lasting appeal to the reader.
That people keep re-translating and republishing new versions of the book in English is testament to people's belief that they can do a better job translating it, but if they believe they can accurately convey the story completely intact into English, they are deluding themselves. Having read all of the books I'm referring to, including the Japanese original (with the caveat that I've only read the opening pages of the third English translation), I think I have a right to my opinions on this. I'm not complaining that it's been translated again - as it's a pretty cool book and I'm glad interest in it continues, but I can't help but shake my head a little at the fact that there are at least three J-E translations of it now. I wonder if it's becoming something like a musical score from Mozart that is reinterpreted by one group of musicians after another. In time, will there be a dozen versions of Botchan?
Just in case it's interesting, here is the fist paragraph of the book in the original Japanese, followed by the 1919 English translation.
親譲りの無鉄砲で小供の時から損ばかりしている。小学校に居る時分学校の二階から飛び降りて一週間ほど腰を抜かした事がある。なぜそんな無闇をしたと聞く人があるかも知れぬ。別段深い理由でもない。新築の二階から首を出していたら、同級生の一人が冗談に、いくら威張っても、そこから飛び降りる事は出来まい。弱虫やーい。と囃したからである。小使に負ぶさって帰って来た時, おやじが大きな眼をして二階ぐらいから飛び降りて腰を抜かす奴があるかと云ったから、この次は抜かさずに飛んで見せますと答えた。
Because of an hereditary recklessness, I have been playing always a losing game since my childhood. During my grammar school days, I was once laid up for about a week by jumping from the second story of the school building. Some may ask why I committed such a rash act. There was no particular reason for doing such a thing except I happened to be looking out into the yard from the second floor of the newly-built school house, when one of my classmates, joking, shouted at me; "Say, you big bluff, I'll bet you can't jump down from there! O, you chicken-heart, ha, ha!" So I jumped down. The janitor of the school had to carry me home on his back, and when my father saw me, he yelled derisively, "What a fellow you are to go and get your bones dislocated by jumping only from a second story!" - "I'll see I don't get dislocated next time," I answered.
Sore dewa, mata!
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
The new (compared to twenty years ago anyway, I think it came out a few years ago) translation seems to be fairly good (based on the first section of the book that I read), but I think it's not really possible to do the book real justice in any other language than the original Japanese. Translations change things, and the ambiance of the translated version is never quite the same as the original. The original (I think) translation by Yasotaro Morri (1919) explains this difficulty well in a forward to the book (just the first two paragraphs of the longer forward here):
A Note by the Translator
No translation can expect to equal, much less to excel, the original. The excellence of a translation can only be judged by noting how far it has succeeded in reproducing the original tone, colors, style, the delicacy of sentiment, the force of inert strength, the peculiar expressions native to the language with which the original is written, or whatever is its marked characteristic. The ablest can do no more, and to want more than this will be demanding something impossible. Strictly speaking, the only way one can derive full benefit or enjoyment from a foreign work is to read the original, for any intelligence at second-hand never gives the kind of satisfaction which is possible only through the direct touch with the original. Even in the best translated work is probably wanted the subtle vitality natural to the original language, for it defies an attempt, however elaborate, to transmit all there is in the original. Correctness of diction may be there, but spontaneity is gone; it cannot be helped.
The task of the translator becomes doubly hazardous in case of translating a European language into Japanese, or vice versa. Between any of the European languages and Japanese there is no visible kinship in word-form, significance, grammatical system, rhetorical arrangements. It may be said that the inspiration of the two languages is totally different. A want of similarity of customs, habits, traditions, national sentiments and traits makes the work of translation all the more difficult. A novel written in Japanese which had attained national popularity might, when rendered into English, lose its captivating vividness, alluring interest and lasting appeal to the reader.
That people keep re-translating and republishing new versions of the book in English is testament to people's belief that they can do a better job translating it, but if they believe they can accurately convey the story completely intact into English, they are deluding themselves. Having read all of the books I'm referring to, including the Japanese original (with the caveat that I've only read the opening pages of the third English translation), I think I have a right to my opinions on this. I'm not complaining that it's been translated again - as it's a pretty cool book and I'm glad interest in it continues, but I can't help but shake my head a little at the fact that there are at least three J-E translations of it now. I wonder if it's becoming something like a musical score from Mozart that is reinterpreted by one group of musicians after another. In time, will there be a dozen versions of Botchan?
Just in case it's interesting, here is the fist paragraph of the book in the original Japanese, followed by the 1919 English translation.
親譲りの無鉄砲で小供の時から損ばかりしている。小学校に居る時分学校の二階から飛び降りて一週間ほど腰を抜かした事がある。なぜそんな無闇をしたと聞く人があるかも知れぬ。別段深い理由でもない。新築の二階から首を出していたら、同級生の一人が冗談に、いくら威張っても、そこから飛び降りる事は出来まい。弱虫やーい。と囃したからである。小使に負ぶさって帰って来た時, おやじが大きな眼をして二階ぐらいから飛び降りて腰を抜かす奴があるかと云ったから、この次は抜かさずに飛んで見せますと答えた。
Because of an hereditary recklessness, I have been playing always a losing game since my childhood. During my grammar school days, I was once laid up for about a week by jumping from the second story of the school building. Some may ask why I committed such a rash act. There was no particular reason for doing such a thing except I happened to be looking out into the yard from the second floor of the newly-built school house, when one of my classmates, joking, shouted at me; "Say, you big bluff, I'll bet you can't jump down from there! O, you chicken-heart, ha, ha!" So I jumped down. The janitor of the school had to carry me home on his back, and when my father saw me, he yelled derisively, "What a fellow you are to go and get your bones dislocated by jumping only from a second story!" - "I'll see I don't get dislocated next time," I answered.
Sore dewa, mata!
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
"Ginza & Yurakucho"
Ginza is historically Tokyo's most well-known area (these days, I'm not so sure - it might even be Shibuya, Roppongi, or Shinjuku), and Yurakucho is way down the list, but the two are side-by-side and for the many people who visit Ginza via Yurakucho Station (JR surface train station), they have to walk through a section of Yurakucho in order to get to Ginza. Yurakucho has long been famous for cheap drinking places, and that's still partly true, although they had to demolish a wide stretch of them when they built the first Shinkansen super express from Tokyo to Osaka (completed in 1964), and the section between Yurakucho Station and Ginza has been mostly rebuilt with shiny glass & steel fashionable buildings that make the section fundamentally an extension of Ginza.
In this video (above), I begin by boarding a Yamanote Line train and riding the loop line over to Yurakucho Station, and then walking through the rebuilt part of Yurakucho and into Ginza. In Ginza (the edge of Ginza), I visit one of the oldest buildings in Ginza (the Okuno Building) to visit some art galleries, and then go over to the fashionable part of Ginza, followed by a visit to the part of Yurakucho that still has cheap drinking places - many with tables and stools that are set out on the street in front of the shops.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
In this video (above), I begin by boarding a Yamanote Line train and riding the loop line over to Yurakucho Station, and then walking through the rebuilt part of Yurakucho and into Ginza. In Ginza (the edge of Ginza), I visit one of the oldest buildings in Ginza (the Okuno Building) to visit some art galleries, and then go over to the fashionable part of Ginza, followed by a visit to the part of Yurakucho that still has cheap drinking places - many with tables and stools that are set out on the street in front of the shops.
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Thursday, May 07, 2009
"Dashboards & Platforms"
Always on a journey from Point-A to Point-B, it's easy to forget that a huge part of the total experience of life is in the transition between Point-A and Point-B. Sitting at stoplights back in car-culture California, I can still recall the details of the dashboards of the various cars I owned - and even recall sounds and smells somewhat. The time in motion was a feeling of freedom of motion, but stoplight time enabled contemplation of the immediate surroundings. I spent a lot of time behind the wheel, getting everywhere I went by car (until I moved to San Francisco, where I first experienced getting almost everywhere by public transportation).
Now I don't have a car, but even when I owned a car in Tokyo, I only drove it once a week or so (to keep the battery charged) and went on trips only once every month or two. Nevertheless, I still remember the details of that car (a 1984 Honda Prelude) in great detail.
All hum-drum stuff, but it just occurred to me recently that in the same way I used to be tuned into the sound of the engine, the location of various gauges (lots of attention focused on the tachometer), etc. now the time waiting on station platforms (the public transportation equivalent of waiting at stoplights) has me tuned into the conditions in train stations in general, such as which spot of the train is nearest to the stairs for the next transfer (when you have 30 seconds to make a connection, every second saved helps!), which passengers look like they should be avoided (it's always a gamble riding public transportation, but if you pay attention, certain things can be avoided), platform construction details (in spite of the law requiring that anything old in Tokyo be demolished and smashed into bits [sarcasm here folks], some small bits and pieces of the past have managed to somehow exist for [gasp!] several decades! And so close scrutiny of structures that have been modified 79 times sometimes reveals unmodified surviving bits), etc.
This video of the two Yamanote Line tracks at Shinjuku Station (among many other lines) is both uniquely Shinjuku and generic Tokyo train system. What's unique about Shinjuku Station? That's hard to pin down, and come to think of it, it might have more to do with knowing that Shinjuku Station handles the largest number of passengers in the country and knowing what's around the station as you get off... and maybe being tuned into the vibration of the place after coming to know it. So, maybe it doesn't seem unique if you blow through as a tourist, but it's definitely unique if you live here. As for the term generic, that's easy - look at the platforms, look at the roofs over the platforms, etc. - all standard JR Tokyo train system (the private lines often have their own feel).
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Now I don't have a car, but even when I owned a car in Tokyo, I only drove it once a week or so (to keep the battery charged) and went on trips only once every month or two. Nevertheless, I still remember the details of that car (a 1984 Honda Prelude) in great detail.
All hum-drum stuff, but it just occurred to me recently that in the same way I used to be tuned into the sound of the engine, the location of various gauges (lots of attention focused on the tachometer), etc. now the time waiting on station platforms (the public transportation equivalent of waiting at stoplights) has me tuned into the conditions in train stations in general, such as which spot of the train is nearest to the stairs for the next transfer (when you have 30 seconds to make a connection, every second saved helps!), which passengers look like they should be avoided (it's always a gamble riding public transportation, but if you pay attention, certain things can be avoided), platform construction details (in spite of the law requiring that anything old in Tokyo be demolished and smashed into bits [sarcasm here folks], some small bits and pieces of the past have managed to somehow exist for [gasp!] several decades! And so close scrutiny of structures that have been modified 79 times sometimes reveals unmodified surviving bits), etc.
This video of the two Yamanote Line tracks at Shinjuku Station (among many other lines) is both uniquely Shinjuku and generic Tokyo train system. What's unique about Shinjuku Station? That's hard to pin down, and come to think of it, it might have more to do with knowing that Shinjuku Station handles the largest number of passengers in the country and knowing what's around the station as you get off... and maybe being tuned into the vibration of the place after coming to know it. So, maybe it doesn't seem unique if you blow through as a tourist, but it's definitely unique if you live here. As for the term generic, that's easy - look at the platforms, look at the roofs over the platforms, etc. - all standard JR Tokyo train system (the private lines often have their own feel).
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
Sunday, May 03, 2009
"Maximizing Disposable Income in Yurakucho"
The vast size of Tokyo (and its connected/neighboring suburbs/regions) means that it is generally impossible to get off work, go home, and then go back out to meet friends. There is simply too much travel time involved and - as often as not - people live in opposing directions, so meeting people close to home doesn't work either.
And so people tend to go to izakaya drinking places that are around transfer stations and at a crossroads for all the people attending. This works out fairly well, but what if your hours have been cut (due to the bad economy) and you can't afford the typical (reasonable, but still not exactly cheap) cost of meeting friends this way?
One option, is to go to a "stand bar", which is a bar with no seats, so you stand - thus "stand bar". (That term probably doesn't make much sense in native-English speaking countries, but if you just consider it to be a distant cousin of English and a local noun, it works. Better still, just use Japanese, and then the English connection is easier to ignore: 有楽町スタンドバー)
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
And so people tend to go to izakaya drinking places that are around transfer stations and at a crossroads for all the people attending. This works out fairly well, but what if your hours have been cut (due to the bad economy) and you can't afford the typical (reasonable, but still not exactly cheap) cost of meeting friends this way?
One option, is to go to a "stand bar", which is a bar with no seats, so you stand - thus "stand bar". (That term probably doesn't make much sense in native-English speaking countries, but if you just consider it to be a distant cousin of English and a local noun, it works. Better still, just use Japanese, and then the English connection is easier to ignore: 有楽町スタンドバー)
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://uk.youtube.com/lylehsaxon
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