Life on a Fast Train

Abstract

"Do people sit next to you on the train?" one of my fellow teachers asked me. I laughed. It's only the daring, the desperate or the drunk who'll choose to sit beside a gaijin (foreigner) on a Tokyo train. Sometimes a person will head towards the empty seat beside me and then realise and swing about to sit somewhere else or even stand. They seem nervous of us "aliens" and afraid we'll try to speak to them in English. One of my students, in his forties, told me he'd never seen a foreign person until he was at university, so I guess in amongst 30 million people in Tokyo we are a bit of a rarity. However this fear of foreigners together with the Japanese custom of "don't draw attention to yourself" can sometimes be taken to extremes. One English friend had her leg jammed between the platform and the train when she slipped while boarding. People looked but no one moved to help her. She was obliged to wrench it out herself and then, in tears and under instructions from a railway officer, shuffle on her bottom back behind the yellow line so the train could leave (without her). Lack of compassion or just the result of living in a city of 30 million people? I once saw an elderly Japanese man helped when he fell backwards on an escalator, but I believe if I collapsed on a platform people would step over me. I guess that's the story in any major metropolis - people become anonymous and invisible.