Japan Diary #3 — Tokyo Subway

     Chicago has some 2.7 million people, using 102 miles of its L subway system.
     Tokyo has 13.8 million people and 121 miles of metro subway. 
     Do the math: five times the population using just 20 percent more track. It gets crowded. 
     Hurrying through the maze of stations, trying to get to the right line, the right track, is like being in an M.C. Escher etching come to life, with surreal masses of people flying in all directions, platoons fleeing up and down stairs, ramps, escalators. If I looked up and saw mobs pounding across the ceiling and walls it could hardly seem more otherworldly.

      It was amazing that no one seemed to be slamming into each other, yet somehow all the hurrying commuters slid around one another. 
     On the platforms, people form lines behind where the doors will open, and while I didn't see any of the famous "pushers" who used to jam people into the trains, I could see the reason they'd be employed. 
      About 100 people a year in Tokyo die by falling in front of subway trains, usually after drinking, and to try to cut that toll, a number of stations I visited had an impressive automatic gate system, where the track is completely walled off from the platform, with doors that slide apart a moment before the train doors open. 

     Other cities around the world have them—Paris is another—but American metropolitan governments don't find them worth the $ 1 million or so they cost for each station. Though about 50 people a year die in New York, putting it roughly on par with Tokyo, the idea of barriers there was dismissed.
    The Tokyo subway also has "Women only" cars, designated by pink signs, for women who want to ride the subway without being fondled by chikan, or "gropers." But only during the morning rush hour. I'd say we don't have those on the Chicago "L" because they're not necessary, but I can't state that with any authority. 

Japan Diary # 2: Rain

Imperial Palace grounds.

     TOKYO —The plan was to start Monday touring the city's Harajuku district, talking to the Lolita goths and costumed cosplay kids who hang around the bridge there about Japanese concepts of cuteness, for my article. 
    But it rained. The weather report had said, "Scattered Showers," but they never scattered. They stayed together, pelting down hard, all day. Really, it was like the opening scene of "Rashomon."
     So Plan B. I walked around the Imperial Palace, waiting for the rain to stop.  The place was utterly deserted, such a contrast to the unbelievable density of the Tokyo subway. Then, when I realized the rain wasn't letting up, I gave Harajuku my best shot but, it was raining, there too, and while there were shoppers, the street scene folk who usually enliven the landscape were staying dry. 
     Across the bridge is the Meiji Jingu Shrine, and since I was standing in front of the entrance, I took refuge there, and toured its gardens, contemplating my mission. I was rewarded with a conversation with a pair of garden guards about yuru-kyara—the official mascots I'm writing about—that helped focus my thinking on the subject.
    By 2 p.m., after ... eight full hours walking in the rain, with another few to go before it let up, I was steaming up my glasses over a bowl of hot ramen. I'm not sure whether it was the best ramen I've ever eaten, or merely the most appreciated. But either way, it brought me back to the room. I only slept an hour last night -- even though I had only slept an hour on the plane, my body still thought it was 12 noon, not 2 a.m. So a nap seems in order. 

Japan Diary #1: How about some pig's rectum with that?

     TOKYO—It's been so long that I've sat among smokers at dinner that I forgot that, in Japan, it's still a thing. It didn't bother me before, so didn't bother me now at this Yakitori bar in the Kabukichan area of Tokyo. In fact, it sort of added to the I'm-in-a-foreign-place vibe, to be among young people puffing away. The food was still good, hot from the brazier, impaled on flimsy wooden stick.s. I had all sorts of skewers — tomatoes wrapped in bacon, grilled asparagas with chicken, pork belly—I drew the line at the more exotic fare, such as sparrow, or pig's rectum. The drink to the left is a Nippon soda, which comes with a clump of ginger, and I found it tasty, in a gingery kind of way.

   The whole trip to Japan has been very low key. The flight, on a new American Airlines 787, was filled but not crowded or hellish. I slept for an hour, which gave me energy to last until ... well, it's nearly 10 p.m. now, or 7 a.m. Chicago time. I don't feel exhausted or jet lagged or anything. Maybe that's tomorrow. 
    If you look at the menu below, you'll see it's fairly cheap—110 yen make a dollar. The hotel is very small, but clean and modern and inviting, and also inexpensive; it set me back $80, a reminder that Japan has been in recession for a long, long time.
     Okay, the last thoughts in my head have drained out. A shower and sleep. 
     If you want something to discuss, consider one reason the Japanese economy is in such trouble is their population is dwindling—the place looked empty on the train from Narita, though it got denser quickly as we approached central Tokyo. It has no border with Mexico and far fewer immigrants (though much more signage, not only in English, but Chinese and Korean than when last I was here, so the place is certainly more multi-cultural). Remember that being anti-immigrant is not only morally wrong, but it's economically disastrous too. G'night.  
      
     

Japan is a strange place

Samuri armor, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

     About 2 a.m. Sunday, Chicago time, I'll be stepping off a plane at Narita airport in Tokyo, if all goes as planned. I decided, since I dredged up old columns on LA for my trip to Los Angeles last month, I shouldn't almost immediately subject you to a week of that regarding Japan, and would try to provide some fresh reporting in real time. But travel and jet lag being what they are, I thought, until I can get myself situated and both experience something noteworthy and find the opportunity to tell you about it, not to mention a Wi-Fi connection, that I'd set the scene with some thoughts from my last visit to Japan, a quarter century ago.

     The army of reporters swarming over Nagano, dazzled by the Olympic glare, seems to have lost sight of one noteworthy aspect of Japan: It is a tremendously strange place.
     Not to the Japanese, I'm sure. They grew up there. They're used to it.
     But to Western eyes — all right, to this Westerner's eyes at least — spending even a brief time in Japan, a few years back, was enough to fix it in my mind forever as somewhere between the Twilight Zone and Shangri-La.
     For instance: umbrella condoms. That's certainly not what they are called there, but that's what I called them. You go into a department store and there are huge rolls of long plastic sheaths designed to slip over your wet umbrella so as not to cause inconvenience while you shop.
     In the places without umbrella condoms, there was something even odder: big umbrella racks. People would leave their umbrellas at the front of the store, with a reasonable assurance that the umbrellas would be there when they returned. Strange, right? Like believing in the tooth fairy. They did the same thing with their shoes at the entrances to temples and certain restaurants. In my country, that practice would result in a lot of barefoot, angry people.
     Frankly, I got the impression that in Japan they could have numbered cubbyholes at the entrances of stores for people to place their wallets in — so the store could rub oil into the leather, or polish the credit cards — and not only would people do it, but the wallets would be there when they got back.
     Some of the weirdness was close to genius. I have deep, sincere admiration for Japanese bathrooms. Many are modular units — the entire room molded out of a single piece of fiberglass. Some toilets have the sink built into the toilet tank. When you flush, a spout of water automatically fills the sink, which drains into the tank. It's very clever; no dirty faucet handles to touch, and the water used washing your hands is then used to flush the toilet later.
     The system seems even more sophisticated when you realize that nearly every other toilet in Asia is a hole in the floor between two footpads.
     Not in Japan. In Japan, taxicabs have a mechanical device that allows the white-gloved driver to fling the rear door open for you, so you don't have to undergo the agony of touching something as dubious as a public vehicle's door handle. Not that I could afford to take a taxi in Japan, but the concept is still admirable, nevertheless.
     There is also something called Tokyo Tower, a giant television tower about the same configuration as the Eiffel Tower, but several times larger and painted orange (again, strange). Go to the top of Tokyo Tower, and you can see the entire city, though God knows why you'd want to, because Tokyo is a cluttered agglomeration of charmless architecture that looks like 100 downtown Dallases assembled together in a 10-by-10 grid.
     In Japan, they have graveyards for fetuses. I happened upon one next to Tokyo Tower. Each grave had a tiny stone statue of a baby. The mothers would knit little caps and bibs for the stone babies, and stick toy pinwheels next to them. Poignant. When the wind picked up, all these pinwheels started going. It was eerie, particularly when I got a translation of some of the messages that had been left at the graves. For example, people who were feeling guilty about an abortion wrote something like "Dear Baby — we're awfully sorry about this. Forgive us . . ." Supposedly the buddhist monks who run the place make a fortune.
     Service is big in Japan. That's one of its best features. Whenever I buy something in a store in Chicago and observe the listless clerk deigning to ring up the sale and fling my purchase in my general direction, I think about how they do things in Japan. I once saw a Japanese clerk run — run — to get an item for me. I stayed at a resort where dinner was brought by a woman in a kimono who crawled into the room on her knees, carrying the food on a lacquered tray. Try finding that at a Sheraton.
     I was in Japan to visit my brother, who worked at a firm there. And the oddest thing of all was something my brother's boss did. He arranged to take me out for a drink. It struck me as unusual, but I was game and went along. (Japan is a drinker's paradise. They sell bottles of scotch from vending machines on train station platforms).
     We sat in a hotel lobby, he, smoking away (everybody smokes there), me, perched on the edge of my seat, wondering what this all was about.
     As it turned out, he just wanted to get to know me. See what kind of family his employee came from. Determine whether I was on a mission to bring my brother home. Just a concerned, friendly employer looking out for the best interests of his company and his people.
     Weird, right?

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 8, 1998

Busy

     So, I said to my wife, sitting at a casual lunch at Roti on Randolph Street in Chicago one day last week: the trouble is, between fact-checking the galleys and writing the columns and the blog posts and getting ready for my trip, I just can't get a week's worth of posts ready ahead of time for Every goddamn day while I'm away.
    "So leave it blank," she said, in the tone someone would say, "Today is Tuesday."
    But, I continued, there's the promise implicit in "Every goddam day..."
    "'Every goddamn day' is a metaphor!" she almost shouted. "For life! The relentlessness of life. Not that you have to write every goddamn day..."
     Easy for her to say. She's not the one who has to watch the online trolls dancing in a joyous conga line around you, laughing and pointing. Or, worse, realizing that no one notices or cares. So my plan is to write from the road, or the airport, or train station, to keep you posted on my travels.
    Assuming it's possible. Japan is far away. Maybe their Wi-Fi won't like my laptop.
    Anyway, another busy day yesterday, between working on an advance column for the paper, proofing my galleys and getting ready for the trip, and today was the first day in two and a half years where I woke up and realized I had entirely forgotten about the blog. But I didn't want to leave you completely high and dry. I do have a promise to keep.  So here you go. I'll check in from Japan tomorrow, if I can. 
   

Flying into fear

     Paris. London. Rome. Jerusalem. 
     Sure, I'm an international traveler. Flitting about the globe like a luna moth—I'm off to Tokyo on Saturday—wearing a bespoke suit, crisply folding my International Herald Tribune in airports from Copenhagen to Hong Kong to Vilnius, stifling a yawn as I notice that my flight takes off in 20 minutes and I had better finish my espresso and amble over to the departure gate, wherever it may be ... 
     No, that's a lie. I'm a stressed out traveler, dressed in my sensible walking shoes,  one hand clutching the lump of my wallet through my clothes, the other my boarding pass, printed out at home 23 hours and 59 minutes before the flight's scheduled departure, using an elbow to nervously guiding my rollie bag, expecting Homeland Security to wrestle me to the floor at any moment, on general principles. 
    But I can aspire, can't I? Why should Donald Trump be the only one with carte blanche to shout down reality and substitute a more flattering image? If a crude, mendacious, gold-plated, blustering P.T. Barnum of a fraud like Trump can insist he's serious presidential timber, then I can pretend I'm Daniel Craig, picking a piece of lint off my lapel and nipping a martini as the hanger in Qatar explodes behind me. 
    I saunter into the airport with the ease of a duke, taking the morning air at his estate...
  
     To continue reading, click here. 

Blood on the tracks

    

    When I first moved to the suburbs, in 2000, I was fascinated by Metra, and did a number of columns on the rail system, such as this one, where I rode in with the engineer and talked about the toll pedestrian deaths take on Metra employees. There have been two this week on the northern lines, which seem like a lot. I also sat down with a Metra honcho to talk about odd questions I had about the rail service. Fans of irony will note that the official fielding my questions was no other than Phil Pagano, who nine years later would step in front of a Metra train himself, ending the complex hash he had made of his life. It was not only tragic and senseless, but an unfathomable insult to everyone who worked at Metra, because Pagano, of all people, must have known the impact such deaths have.

     'We're late," said John Appel, the engineer driving a 3200-horsepower Metra engine toward the city at 70 miles per hour.
      That we were. But just seven minutes late. Only railroads care about being seven minutes late. That's on time everywhere else. Heck, seven minutes late at O'Hare Airport is early.
     I was riding with Appel, in the control car of the 8:17 a.m. Milwaukee line from Northbrook. The engine was in the back, and we were in a little cab area tucked into the top of the foremost passenger car.
     My ride was something of a fluke. Ever since I began the commute in the city, I've been noticing what I called "Metra Mysteries," odd aspects of commuting that I couldn't quite explain. What are those piles of sand doing on the tracks? Why do the switches burn bright blue in winter? I had guesses but didn't really know for certain.
     I approached Metra, and they sat me down with Phil Pagano, the executive director. Pagano answered my questions -- we'll get to them in a minute -- then, in discussing the various ways frantic commuters risk death to avoid being late for work, said I should really ride with an engineer to see the Auto Thrill Show for myself. He wasn't kidding.
     "Right around the gates!" said Appel, pointing to a woman zipping her car across the tracks, maybe five seconds ahead of the train. He said he's had commuters cling to the outside of the train as it pulls out. One unfortunate woman attempted to get from one side of the train to the other by crawling under. The train pulled away, maiming her.
     "It's unbelievable what they'll do," said Appel. "So many horror stories. We all have foolish moments, but here it can cost you your life."
     Appel doesn't want to talk about the suicides, the people who walk to meet the oncoming trains. Metra gives you three days off, mandatory, when that happens, and offers the services of a counselor.
     "It's terrible," said Appel, who called his job "12 hours of boredom interspersed with three or four 10-second intervals of sheer terror."
      He would, however, talk about the time a semi-trailer carrying beer decided to back onto the tracks just as the train was racing toward it at 70 miles an hour. It was, needless to say, memorable.
     "The 18-wheeler wrapped itself around the engine," said Appel. "You never forget that sort of thing."
     Appel was suitably businesslike in discussing his profession. There is a pleasing sense of dignity, of seriousness of purpose and respect for the customer that has lingered in railroad employees while fading nearly everywhere else. I loved that, despite the fact that I was riding with the engineer, the conductor nevertheless insisted on punching my ticket. Otherwise, it would be stealing from the railroad.
     Before we run out of space, on to the Metra Mysteries.
     Q. Just before the train departs, the lights go out for a minute or so -- I think of it as powering up the atomic core. What's happening?
     A. "They're unplugging the train from standby electrical power," said Pagano. They have to do this before they power up the diesel; otherwise the 500 kilowatts produced by the engine's generator -- enough to power a block of suburban homes -- would "fry the system."
     Q. So what's with the piles of sand on the tracks? There can't be that many ill passengers wretching from the platform.
     A. "A traditional braking mechanism," said Pagano. Basically, the engines have reservoirs of sand which, if thetracks are slick or they're going a bit too fast, is dumped over the wheels to give them traction.
     Q. What about the burning switches out in the yard in winter, obviously to keep them from freezing; isn't that kind of low-tech?
      A. "These are techniques people learn through experience," said Pagano. "For a while, the industry went to hot air blowers, steam machines. Nothing worked like the gas switch heaters."
     Q. Anything that can be done about the cell phones? Can't users be forced to ride in special cars, isolated from the non-obnoxious riders?
      A. "We've come up with some creative posters," he said. "The biggest abusers of cell phones are lawyers. The things they talk about in public -- business and clients -- it's phenomenal." He said that experiments of confining them to special cell phone cars, where they can bother each other, have not worked. "They tried that on the East Coast, and the New Yorkers found the conductors have a lot more important things to do than monitor people's cell phone use."
      Q. I've noticed that a good number of my fellow riders start lining up to get off the train at Western Avenue. Are these the same people who bolt out of the Lyric Opera during the last aria? What's their rush?
      A. "It happens all over," said Pagano. "Every train, a small group of people want to beat the crowd. All you're doing is going to work."
      Q. I always notice all the coffee cups, ticket stubs and newspapers left behind by my fellow passengers. Don't they realize somebody has to clean up after them? Didn't their parents teach them anything?
      A. "The majority of people are conscientious," Pagano said. "There's no doubt probably a pretty significant group -- 30 or 40 percent -- who are, I wouldn't say slobs, but who leave their papers and soda cans behind."
      So now you know.
                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 20, 2001