End Of The Line January 27, 2009

Even amidst today’s globalised cultural homogeneity thanks to which there is a branch of Starbucks in the Forbidden City and even previously uncontacted tribes of the deepest Amazon recognise the Golden Arches, Japan has somehow managed to maintain something of the exotique about it. Even though on the surface Japan is one of the most ‘Westernised’ of Eastern nations - fully industrialised, modernised and capitalised, and boasting the highest concentration of McDonald’s restaurants anywhere in the world (26.2 per square mile in central Tokyo) - Japan remains somehow fundamentally ‘different’ enough from anything we can experience here on our quiet little island that the appeal of the Mystic Orient is still strong. It is this strange attractive force that drives otherwise sane and normal men and women to waste months, even years of their lives slavishly watching the endless streams of vapid anime cartoons that Japan generates, masturbate over images of animated schoolgirls being elaborately befouled by many-tentacled aliens/mutants/demons, and even to dress as their favourite characters from said anime series or cartoon rapefest and attend conventions for like-minded Japanophiles where they will (presumably) re-enact some of their favourite incest/rape/tentacle orgy scenes together.

But this Otaku (geek) culture is only one of the many facets of Japanese culture as stereotyped by Westerners; assumptions of Japan are many and varied. Of course there’s the anime/manga/hentai aspect, but there’s also bushido, the noble path of the Samurai, a great many martial arts with their strict codes of discipline, and an unbending sense of honour and propriety. There are robots, lasers and futuristic electronic gadgets and a particularly adventurous and creative – not to mention lucrative – sex industry. The list could go on. Two further characteristics of Japanese society which persistently crop up in Western images of Japan are an unfathomable propensity for suicide, and an unerringly efficient and punctual public transport network.

May I start by saying that both of these crass, uninformed generalisations which, to be frank, border on racism, are inescapably true. While Japan has not topped the table of international suicide rates for at least a decade (it now languishes in 8th place behind a raft of apparently depressed former Soviet satellite states, with Lithuania currently holding the much coveted title of Most Suicidal Nation), its suicide rate remains more than 4 times that of Great Britain. On top of this, suicide in Japan has been highly ritualised in the past, and even today is considered fairly commonplace.

Japan’s mass transit system is crowded, hot, uncomfortable and frustrating, but nonetheless it is extremely efficient and punctual. If your train is full but more passengers wish to come aboard, polite men in smart uniforms wearing white gloves will happily lend a hand or shoulder in squeezing more people than you would have ever though possible into a railway carriage. If, by some unforeseeable and strange occurrence, your train should arrive later than scheduled, the same polite men are ready to dispense apology slips, which you can show to your employer to explain why you were 3 and a half minutes late for work today.

I am making this process seem a lot more calm and organised than it actually is. Rush hour in Tokyo is indescribably hectic, crowded, hot and noisy and is only able to function at all because everyone knows precisely where they are going, how to get there and precisely how long it takes for them to complete their journey. If you place a Gaijin (foreigner) into the same situation the result will invariably be confusion, disorientation, panic, rage and, eventually, regression to the mental state of a 4 year-old ending with the poor unfortunate White Man curled up in a corner sucking his thumb and crying uncontrollably. Things only get worse when a train is delayed, as the trains are even more crowded than usual, and with the timetable disrupted several heavily-laden trains are liable to arrive simultaneously, resulting in a stampede to rival La Corrida at Pamplona. The crush of people becomes so severe that you no longer have any control over where you are walking – you are simply carried along by an inexorable tide of bodies, and if you are lucky you will be washed ashore somewhere near to where you were trying to get.

But what has an unhealthy penchant for auto-assassination got to do with the efficiency of Japan’s groaning rail network? And what, indeed, has any of this got to do with the price of eggs?

The thing is, Japan’s most popular method of suicide is death-by-locomotive. Japanese men (it is almost exclusively overworked businessmen) are throwing themselves under fast-moving trains on a daily basis. This, understandably, causes significant disruption to the aforementioned punctuality of said trains. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that all major delays on any rail network in Japan are almost invariably caused by a suicide.

But what is interesting is the reaction – or lack thereof – from Japanese commuters. The electronic boards displaying train time information will politely refer to ‘an incident involving a person’ as the cause of the delay, but it is understood by all what this means – a desperately stressed, overworked or depressed Japanese businessman has finally reached the stage at which he can endure no longer, and he feels that the only possible course of action for him is to take his own life. Perhaps he has just lost his job and cannot face his family to tell them the news. Maybe his gambling debts have finally caught up to him and he would sooner take his own life than see his home repossessed and his family made destitute. He could have finally succumbed to the depression with which he has been struggling for decades. Whatever the individual story, without knowing any of the details you know, without doubt, that it is a desperately tragic tale of crushing personal grief and sorrow, that somewhere there is a family who has just lost their son, husband or father and will never get him back. You do not need to know the man’s name, profession, income or marital status to feel sorrow at the dreadful thing which has just happened, and you cannot help but to feel slightly – only very, very marginally – involved in the tragedy.

And yet, this is not the reaction visible on the faces of those fellow commuters around you. They are checking their watches, glaring at the electronic signboard accusingly, shuffling their feet and checking their watches again, wondering when the next train will come. You can read their minds, every one of them. “How inconvenient…” they think. Not “How tragic.” Not “I wonder whether he was married.” Not “What could have possibly driven him to end his own life?” Just “How inconvenient”.

But this is always the case – when surrounded by death one becomes inured to it. When a dearly beloved pet is put to sleep, it is a heart-wrenching moment for the doting owner but for the vet, who does this all time, it is merely part of the job. A sad part, no doubt, but it is taken in stride. A soldier fighting on the front line will mourn the passing of his close comrades in arms, but cannot think of the tragedy of the adversary he has just shot and killed. So it is with the Japanese commuter – his own life, his own tragedies, his own joys are real to him, but the tragedy of just-another-salaryman throwing himself on the tracks only makes him late for work.

The thing, however, which I found the most deeply disturbing is how quickly one can adopt this callous mindset. The first time my train was delayed by “an incident involving a person”, it took me a few minutes to work out what that meant, and then when the train finally did arrive I travelled in statue silence, with a cold feeling in my heart at the thought that I had just been peripherally involved in a man’s suicide.

A month or so later, the same thing happened again. In the intervening few weeks, several of my friends had been delayed by similar events on different lines, so it was nothing like the chilling shock that I felt the first time. “What a bastard!” I joked to the friends I was travelling with, “Why would he kill himself at 8am on a weekday morning? Couldn’t he just kill himself on a national holiday or something?” Everyone laughs. A bad taste joke, I know, but the suicide causing my delay seemed far enough removed from myself that it was okay to joke about it.

About two weeks later we had Monday off from University to celebrate Culture Day (lord only knows what the purpose of this holiday is). All Tokyo universities put on a school festival over the long weekend of Culture Day, and as I hadn’t been to mine yet over the weekend I decided to go and see what it involves. When I got to the station, however, the ticket barriers seemed closed, and there several people milling around looking confused. A large blackboard had been put up with a message scrawled in Japanese which I couldn’t read, but by-and-by an announcement came on over the Tannoy system: “We apologise for the inconvenience, but due to an incident involving a person…” it began. I rolled my eyes heavenwards, cursing the inconsiderate bastard who had gone and flung himself under a train when I wanted to go into town to see my school festival but just then I caught myself, and realised with a strangely cold feeling that this was, in fact, exactly what I had wished only two weeks earlier. “What a bastard!” I had said “Couldn’t he just kill himself on a National Holiday or something?”

And just like that I realised what I had become.

The rail companies, for their part, have done what they can to discourage suicide on the railway tracks by imposing enormous fines on the families of those who have just killed themselves to compensate them for lost revenue from the delays. This seems more than a little insensitive to me.

Dear Madam, 
We regret to inform you that your husband has killed himself. Please find enclosed a bill for 50 million yen. Payment is due by the end of the month.
Yours sincerely,
Japan Railways

It’s enough to drive anyone to suicide.

Genghis Kong is currently residing in Tokyo
For sporadic and ill-informed updates and observations on Japan, visit his blog at genghiskongvs.blogspot.com