Just in Tokyo: Page 18

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18 - Just In Tokyo

Businesses, museums and other institutions in Japan are prepared
to help you find them by subway. The subways have multiple exits,
places where you emerge out from the subterranean city into busy
Tokyo. If someone says exit 12A, be sure to remember that; in
stations with multiple exits, some will be hundreds of meters away
from each other, and without grid streets you can't expect to find
your way from one subway exit to another easily.

Subterranean Mingling

Riding the subway in Tokyo is the closest many foreigners could
ever come to physical intimacy with Japanese people. You will find
yourself compressed severely. Picture a silent mosh pit with people
in nicer clothes. Morning and evening rush hour is the business
suited folks; the last train after midnight is the real fun with inebriated
souls exhaling and laughing and swaying a bit more wobbly-like.

There's something fantastic about being this close to this many
people when most of them are being quiet. Most manage to keep
their personal boundaries even though they have an elbow in their
face. People are careful with their eyes in these crowds; little or no
eye contact with nearby riders helps maintain personal space.

Crowds surge out and in, an unstoppable force carrying whatever
pieces of you might be sandwiched between them. Unsuspecting
passengers can lose a shoe or a bag easily, especially if they are
standing near the door.

Subterranean Health

Riding the subway in Tokyo puts you at ground zero for the 1995
sarin gas attacks by Aum Shinrikyo. Religious cultists excited to see
doomsday thought they might premeditate the end of the world by
poisoning the Tokyo subway system with sarin gas. When you see
how remarkably efficient the system is, you can imagine how scores
of coughing, bleeding, blinded people groping their way around these
stations must have really thrown a wrench in the works.

So is that why you'll see so many Japanese folks in the subway
wearing facemasks? It can be unsettling - are they paranoid, or
protecting themselves from something the rest of us are too lazy
and ignorant to understand? Maybe Sarin poisoning? To discover the
reason people wore these things, before I spoke Japanese, I donned