On Japanese trains

Rail travel highlights the contrast between the private and the communal in the land of the well-mannered mob. An excerpt from the recently released, "Salon.com's Wanderlust: Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance."

By Sallie Tisdale

Dec 8, 2000 | Somewhere in the controlled anarchy of my weeks in Japan last fall, I found myself in a group hug, in the public arena of a crowded train station. I was traveling to several temples with a shifting crowd of Buddhist friends and acquaintances, most of them Americans with no experience in Japan and only a little conversational language.

We'd been moving from one monastery or temple to the next almost every day, bearing gifts, paying respects, attending ceremonies. We rose at 3:30 or 4 every morning, joining in temple schedules until after breakfast, and then moved on, by foot, taxi, bus and train, sometimes all in a day. Mostly, we took trains; when I wasn't in a zendo in Japan, I seemed to be in a station. And after a few weeks in the world of Japanese trains, I felt as though movement itself was my home.

That day in Kanazawa, a busy city in Ishikawa Prefecture, we were overcome by giddy exhaustion. We had a long wait at the Kanazawa station -- when we weren't moving, we were usually waiting. We piled onto a bench in a heap, a dozen scruffy, coarse Americans out of place in the decorous quiet of Japanese business travelers, and somehow Mikio ended up in the middle. Mikio was raised in Tokyo and Osaka, but is married to an American woman and lives in the United States now.

Mikio has told me more than once that he is "not Japanese" anymore. Japanese who leave the country and live elsewhere for a time are never quite the same, he says. He often has a slightly bewildered expression on his thin face, the look of a man who thinks he's missed an appointment. Even in Kanazawa, Mikio had that look. The American boisterousness and informality he'd gradually grown used to in his new home stood out starkly in his old one. From deep in the tangle of arms and legs, I could hear his plaintive, clipped cry: "We do not touch much!" he yelped, muffled by the bodies of his alarming friends.

Taking trains is inevitable in Japan, unavoidable -- but why would you want to avoid it? The trains are a microcosm of the whole country. I have never had a romantic vision of Japan, never felt a particular urge to visit. This trip was purposeful, specific -- not exactly about Japan for Japan's sake. But day by day, living in the world of the trains, I found myself delighted. It was like stumbling into an accidental love affair with someone as different from your dreams as a person can be.

We do not touch much, Mikio said, suddenly very Japanese again. I knew in the midst of it how out of place our group hug was in that world, but I puzzled over his words. The Japanese are always together. The Japanese tolerate crowds that Americans, the most space-hungry people in the world, find impossible, but in all this swarming humanity, there is always distance, too. They are never alone and they are never completely together, either. Where there is no privacy, there are many masks.

The Japanese are always together, millions of people on a few small islands, mostly in small houses with small rooms. They crowd the sidewalks, walking rapidly from chore to chore, one demand to the next, in well-dressed, quiet, urban mobs. They travel together, lining up politely at bus stops and filling subway platforms in converging flocks.

Even at home, there is little privacy. Many houses have no central heating, and families spend winter time together in a single small space. Almost every workplace operates as a second family, with attendant obligations and society. Japanese hotels charge by the customer, not the room, and put as many people into each as possible -- futons lined up on the sweet-smelling tatami mats with only a few inches between. Many public bathrooms are shared by both genders, men discreetly lined up at urinals and women silently squatting in stalls. In the public bathhouses, strangers crouch together on the tile floors to wash before climbing together into big communal tubs. Many people ride trains in standing-room-only crowds for hours every day, the crucible for all this togetherness.

To say "Japanese trains" is to say a mouthful. There are long-distance and local trains of several kinds, as well as city subways and streetcars. The national system was made private some time ago, and there are now six Japan Rail (usually called JR) companies connected throughout the country. They work together so well that the rider never knows this. From one city to another, you may move from one line to the next, from the hands of one company to the next, without a clue. Fares, rail passes and tickets are treated as though the companies were one.

Throwing yourself into the hands of the Japanese rail system is like entering a giant creature's belly -- a massive organism where everything happens quickly and by large measures. More than 100,000 people pass through the enormous and ugly Tokyo train station every day -- sometimes many more, shoved into place during rush hours by white-gloved, well-groomed handlers. At such times, Mikio says in his precise English, "You are like a water molecule in water. You cannot go where you want to go." He tells me a story of a briefcase that was carried away by closely packed bodies, floating across the car, out of reach and never falling to the floor.

In every city's rail station, hordes of commuters appear like rivers of lemmings, pouring out of trains, across platforms and down the long flights of stairs to the next platform, the next train. They fill the passageways, heading in a single direction, then splitting apart into smaller streams -- men, men, men, all in dark suits, white shirts, ties and uniformly serious expressions; flocks of women in skirted suits; small groupings of beautifully coiffed women in kimonos scooting along in tiny steps; masses of uniformed schoolchildren in pleated skirts and ironed shorts, banging heavy book bags on their thighs; even half-naked sumo wrestlers swaggering along, twice as big as their fellows and exuding an almost American self-consciousness. At any moment, you can be swept without warning against a wall by a crowd appearing from around a corner -- a descending, ascending, hurrying crowd. Shoved, not by hands or bodies, but by the sheer force of the group which is suddenly moving in the other direction, with an aura so intent on its goal that it can't be resisted.

Next Page: No one had warned us about the stairs

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