Finger Lickin' Good

The daily commute. It’s a war-zone; a battle-ground where only the fittest survive and the weak, the aged, and the infirm are winnowed from the healthy core of society, dispassionately and mercilessly. You know this.

I assume that by now I don’t need to go to any great lengths describing the particular conditions for foreigners using public transport in Japan. The gaijin zone, the Empty Seat, the amazing invisible force-field we seem to generate, along with the opprobrium we attract for acts which would be disregarded if perpetrated by Japanese people.

Even so, there are still universal rules. Unwritten rules that only the inept or oblivious breach. Like the clear and obvious rules on urinal use that most men instinctively know how to follow, whatever culture they hail from. In case I’m being too cryptic, allow me to explain with a couple of diagrams. Behold the painstaking technique underpinning my mastery of Microsoft Paint. I’m classically trained, you know.

fig. 1

My commute takes me one stop past the main city station, where most people get off. This means that if I haven’t already gained a seat by studiously ignoring the old, the crippled, or the otherwise incapacitated, then I can at least sit down for the last few minutes of my journey. Figure 1 demonstrates the situation I found myself in the other morning. A booth of four seats facing each other. Less than ideal, really. The backs flip back and forth so the seats can always face the direction of travel (the blue arrow), but that means there’s always a little pod at one end, and the leg-room is the same here – for four people – as it is for a regular double seat.

Still, a seat’s a seat. More people get off than on at the main station, so there are normally a fair few seats free afterwards. I’ll grab one and the gaijin zone does the rest. Unless it’s unusually busy there’s not even a need to ‘accidentally’ leave my bag on the seat next to me in a pathetically transparent blocking maneuver.

Because even here, normal, non-gaijin etiquette works for you. The seats are notionally numbered: A1, B1, A2, B2 and the like. I can’t remember what the numbers were in this particular instance, so for your ease of reference I’ve labelled the seats here with pictures of a Louche Gnome, a Cheesecake, and Timmy Mallet (figure 2).

fig. 2

The best seat is clearly the window seat facing the direction of travel (Red Star). Being by the window confers many benefits – you can look out of it for one. The scenery’s the usual mix of over-engineered watercourses and grey, post-industrial miscellany, but as a way to avoid making eye-contact with your fellow travellers it makes a nice change from squinting at your phone. Sitting in the window seat also significantly reduces your chances of having to tolerate a stranger’s arse or crotch hovering six-inches away from your face for the duration of your journey. Facing the direction of travel is good because, like a gunslinger who always sits facing the door in a wild-west saloon, you can see any trouble coming. Or something.

If Red Star is taken, commuter etiquette dictates that the next person to enter the booth takes the seat opposite and across (Louche Gnome), this allows both travellers maximum legroom whilst avoiding unnecessary body contact. Any third person usually then has a choice to make – Cheesecake or Timmy Mallet? If my great gangling legs are clogging up the space by the window, people usually choose Mallet, but if it’s especially busy they may bow to the inevitability of someone having to sit in Cake eventually, and prefer playing footsy with my good self to being clambered over by some insistent salaryman. In a two-taken/two-free scenario there is no hard and fast rule that I can discern, both Cake and Mallet seem acceptable.

This is where it gets a bit weird. Last Thursday, after three-quarters of the carriage alights and the usual trickle of people get on, I knock over an old lady who’s taking too long to drag her half-dead carcass off the train and bag the Star. So far so good; the carriage is half-empty and there’s a real chance I might get all four seats to myself for the remaining five minutes of my journey. You can appreciate the dismay with which I  then notice a middle-aged salaryman clocking that the only free double-seat is the Cake/Gnome combination opposite me. Ah well. Can’t have everything. I resign myself to sharing the booth for the remainder of the trip.

He only goes and sits in Mallet, doesn’t he?

How does this happen? What kind of crazy, fucked-up Bizarro World have we just entered? I look out of that hard-won window and confirm that, yes, the sky is still up and the ground is still down, and no, we haven’t slipped through a flaw in the space-time continuum into an alternate reality where transcendence has been achieved and the laws of nature, physics, and causality are but as playthings to the omnipotent super-beings the human race has become. This is still early 21^st Century suburban Japan and some heinous motherfucker is sitting in Timmy Fucking Mallet.

Commuter etiquette and gaijin zone. That’s double indemnity right there, Twatbubbles. What the fuck do you think you’re doing? The Gnome, you should be sitting in the Gnome! If you’re going to play fast and loose with societal proprieties like this you might as well just drop your trousers and start furiously masturbating to the lottery adverts hanging from the ceiling. Frankly that would still leave me feeling less violated than what you’ve just done.

Pull it 'til it bleeds, my son.

The final five minutes of that trip are the longest of my life. This gives me plenty of time to consider the question as to what kind of uncaring, indifferent god would create a universe in which such a thing could happen.

My conclusion was that it was the weather’s fault, or more specifically the way I’d reacted to the weather. You see, it was sunny and I was wearing my linen suit. My cream linen suit.

Yes. I know. But I bought it ages ago, before I first came to Japan. I was younger and had even poorer dress-sense then than I do now. It seemed like a practical decision. ‘Japanese summers are hot,’ I thought, ‘and linen is cooler than wool.’ What I didn’t appreciate at the time was just how bollock meltingly humid Japanese summers truly are. I could dress in nothing but the flimsiest of shifts, tailored from the most diaphanous wisps of lace and the first frozen moments of mid-winter’s dawn, and I’d still be sweating from my toenails within thirty second of stepping out of the shower.

So the linen makes fuck all difference, and the colour just adds insult to injury, to be honest. But it’s hard enough for me to buy clothes that fit over here, and if I wear this suit every once in a while hopefully it’ll mean my other, better ones last a bit longer. Even so, it’s hard to work out exactly what I was thinking when I decided to buy it. Who wears white suits? Apart from pimps and dandies, of course. And the man from Del Monte.

“Yes! Having forced us out of centuries of subsistence farming and into 

a precariously risk-prone cash-crop monoculture, the post-colonial 

neo-imperial corporate avatar has consented to buy our produce! 

Yes! Now we will have enough food for winter and won’t 

have to sell any more of the children! Yes!”

That’s not really within the Japanese frame of reference, to be honest. And neither are any number of other unfortunates and undesirables who thought wearing white was just the thing. But there is one significant white-wearer the Japanese do know –

Had I been wearing my usual sober blues or greys, I’d have been safe. But the lighter shades of the textile whitewash I’d given myself just made me a target for a stray, socially graceless spicy chicken fucker. He obviously mistook me for Colonel Sanders, and so keen was he for a whiff of my secret blend of herbs and spices that he was willing to ignore some of our most powerful social conventions just for the chance to partake of my fun bucket of grease and poultry. I mean, I’m not a kindly old southern gent. I have brown hair (mostly), twenty-twenty vision and am clean-shaven, but I guess we do all look kind of similar. Easy mistake to make.

So my advice to all those who complain about unconscious racism in Japan is this: lighten up, and make your peace with fried chicken. White’s just a friendlier colour.

You’re welcome.

A lot of credit where it's due.