I witnessed my first system failure in Japan the other day. Ok, maybe not complete failure. But things went wrong, in a place where things rarely go wrong. Especially when they involve public transport. The train system is definitely one of Japan’s strong suits; something it rightly boasts as the best in the world. The punctuality, the cleanliness, the unsurpassed efficiency of it… all characteristics of something I hold in reverence. Trains have been my passport to Japan since I arrived- shuttling me here and there between my smallish town and the castles, metropolises, temples, villages, mountains and oceans beyond.
I’ve come to know the different types of trains well (brand-new five-star shinkansens, generic local trains, tiny, rickety ‘one-man’ cars), their various smells (the wet-dog funk of a rainy day, the sticky, sweaty aroma of summer, the acrid stench of alcohol on the last train home), and the unspoken rules of on-board etiquette (never look someone in the eyes, take up as little space as possible, don’t engage in lively conversation before 7pm on a weekday). By now, it’s pretty safe to say that where trains are concerned, I’ve turned Japanese.
To think of Japan’s train lines as its arteries and veins (with Tokyo the heart, and Nagoya and Osaka other vital organs) wouldn’t be too fanciful.
So when trains here are late, you know something bad has happened. You learn that the most likely explanation for a train delay in super-efficient Japan is a suicide. Yep, someone has jumped onto the tracks, and usually succeeded in their mission.
Yesterday, my Belgian friend Aurelie (who I met in Canada and was now hosting in Japan- hello globalization) and I boarded the train for Takayama. We were heading up there to see an ukiyoe exhibit, lured by the offer of free tickets from another friend. All was well at first, bar a run-in with the third middle-aged man in two days to forcibly engage us in English conversation practice. Having shaken him off with a train-change, we settled contentedly into our seats on the express bound for Toyama. But on arrival at Hida Kanayama station (i.e. middle of nowhere), the train stopped, and didn’t get going again FOR FIVE HOURS.
Of course there was no indication that we were in for five hours of suspended animation. As far as I was concerned, this was an unusual, if not unprecedented, train delay, and we would be only a little late meeting my friend. At first Aurelie and I were wrapped up in conversation so it didn’t bother us in the slightest. But after two hours we were getting restless. There had been announcements, but no explanation of the problem- that I, with my conversational Japanese, could decipher. After hour three, I was starting to think that this wasn’t a case of “someone on the tracks”. We were even getting to the point of losing sympathy for the hypothetical victim, and discussed how long it should reasonably take to clean up after such an incident.
A few times, Aurelie and I left the train and sauntered around the platform, to battle a growing case of cabin fever. Passengers in the train stuck going the other direction stared woefully out at us. A local wandered out of his house to gawk at the motionless trains and peer down the tracks, all the while tucking in his shirt. At least the view was pretty. That part of Hida is gorgeous. The station was nestled among small mountain houses surrounded by lush spring greenery spilling down from the forest.
What struck me most about the whole experience was the behavior of the other (Japanese) passengers. For the most part, there was no behavior. They stayed in their seats and dozed, or stared at their mobile phone screens. There was an air of resignation about the whole thing. And this was despite a lack of information from the authorities. No one really knew what was going on, but apparently no one really cared. There was a middle-aged woman scurrying around, hassling the conductors with questions of “when?”, but mostly people just stayed put and waited it out. With not so much as a sigh of impatience.
It got me thinking. I know I’ve changed, being here in Japan. I’ve definitely developed more patience and a greater ability to just ‘let things go’. This is a result of both absorbing some of the cultural norms and the fact that there’s so much more I can’t control here, being a foreigner. For the most part, patience and endurance are a virtue. Certainly they were in the delayed train situation. But I maybe they can also signal apathy and aversion to change. I couldn’t help but think that had there actually been an emergency, where passengers could have done something to help or escape danger, that they would have just stayed put and waited for instructions from the authorities.
I’m sure plenty of people were fuming inside, in their own way. But Japanese culture trains them (no pun intended) to hide outward expressions of strong negative emotions, so they’re masters at concealing frustration. Although strange, the quiet atmosphere in the face of a major disruption to the day was refreshing for me. For the time that I was able to, it was soothing to just accept that our day of sightseeing was shot, sit back, and listen to my iPod, safe in the knowledge that whoever needed to was busily and efficiently working at a solution to the problem.
