Every morning I take the train to work. It is the first train out of Okubo and it leaves at 5:31 am. Usually there aren’t too many people waiting for the train at my station, but I see familiar faces every day – commuting to work just like me.
The time and location of the station in relation to the train’s course mean that when it arrives, the seats are about 90% full. Usually if you are in the front of the line, you have a small chance of getting a seat. Since I don’t get much exercise at work I usually prefer to stand, but many of the people waiting for my train try to get a seat. This is really important to them for some reason, and you see some pretty surprising and un-Japanese behavior when an open seat is on the line.
At each station on this train line there are markers on the ground that show the position where the train will stop. Each marker has two symbols side by side to indicate that people should stand two by two and line up from there. This is “the way it has always been done” and I think that most people follow this rule. Some people don’t want to stand next to another person so they line up behind instead, and some people don’t line up at all and just wait for everyone else to board the train and then hop on.
Down the platform from me there is an older guy who lines up right between the two symbols, effectively taking both front positions for himself. When the train comes, he can choose whichever side looks best and he has twice the chance of anyone else to grab a seat. This kind of behavior essentially gives yourself an advantage at the expense of others, and is something you don’t often see in Japan. That’s one of the reasons I like living here – people tend to be fair about things and think of others before themselves.
So every morning the guy down the platform takes both positions and people line up behind him properly and probably don’t really care because they don’t want to cause problems by calling him on his behavior and make a scene and disturb the quiet morning and everyone is sleepy anyway, and what does it matter – it is still just Tuesday and we’ve got to see this guy every day after this so we shouldn’t piss anyone off.
One of my students once told me a story about the time that there was a young woman taking both front positions in line early in the morning and so he politely asked her if she was standing on the left side or the right side, and she started screaming at the top of her lungs to “get the hell away from me you crazy old fuck” which certainly disturbed the peaceful morning and caused my student to permanently change his commute time to avoid any risk of bumping into the lady in the future.
But the thing I want to express here is that I think it is really important to just commit to one side or the other. Make your decision, live with the result whether it is a good or bad one, and then use the result of today’s decision to inform tomorrow’s decision. Hedging your bets between one choice and another at the expense of everyone else is not really making a decision at all, and I do believe that life will ultimately reward people that are decisive, even if in the short term the result isn’t ideal.
As for me, I always stand on the right.
