WORKING IN JAPAN: PT. 15

A couple of interesting conversations/stray thoughts/everyone addicted to their fucking phones

I am used to the job now. Every day I clean two stations with little more than muscle memory. It’s relaxing and leaves my mind free. Sometimes I am on the platform, and other times in a toilet cubicle, thinking. The breeze blows. Someone lets out a fart that sounds like a sad whale. And I think on, and on… but slowly.

These aren’t the frantic thoughts that come with office work, the desperate escapist confections that feel like your brain is trying to burst out of your skull and roll in a beeline to the nearest park or library. They are tranquil, semi-formed ideas that arrive in a gentle and barely connected train. I am at rest, inside, and partially at play.

Anyhow, I had a couple of interesting exchanges with coworkers. One is a guy I call Mr. Friendly. He’s older than me, maybe about sixty, with silver hair down over the ears.

‘I skip certain things,’ I told Mr. Friendly, ‘Some of this stuff doesn’t need wiping down every day. I put things off occasionally and use the time I’ve saved to scrape up gum.’
I was lying about the gum. I’ve given up on the platform gum.

‘If you went strictly by the manual…’ said Mr. Friendly, ‘You’d never get it all done. It’s fine.’

And I think he’s echoing the common sentiment. There’s no way all the cleaners at my company are following the manual. Some of them are at an age where that would probably be tough. I’m starting to think that we’re all doing half the work, maybe three quarters, taking care of the really noticeable stuff then going home. When Flint was training me, he had to put on a good show, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s half-assing a few of his duties as well.

I had another talk with a guy I’ll call Chatterbox, a nice man and veritable random topic machine. He’ll talk about JFK and secret organisations with barely a prompt, sending conversations into all kinds of colourful corners. We were talking about offices, and, of course, our disdain for them.

‘I can’t do it,’ I said, ‘I can’t be forced to be around people like that. I feel trapped. This job, though… In this job you can work alone.’

‘I’m the same,’ said Chatterbox, ‘This is better.’

I think he’s right, and so am I. This is better. Office work involves forced socialisation, an environment that forces people to be civil, subservient and stiffly polite to non-relations, non-friends they really don’t give a fuck about. Everyone is subtly competing, striving to be perfect and always maintain a professional face. It doesn’t help if it’s open plan, a workplace design so cruelly antithetical to my foundational animal instincts that it makes me want to swan dive through a closed window.

In the office, I dreamt of leaving. I squirmed and writhed and yearned to check my phone. But, being at a train station with freedom of ambulation, I do not hunger for my phone. I check my social media occasionally, usually when I sit down, or take the pulse of my wretched stock portfolio if it pops in my head, but, generally, I don’t really look at my phone. Why would I? The sky and the outdoors are more appealing.

A lot of people are addicted to their phones, however. You can see it when they stand, waiting for a train, or when they feel trapped and bored, often after they sit in one of the carriages. They fidget, constantly, with the glass and metal rectangle, doomscrolling and dopamine farming, frantically phantom chasing, unable to climax. There’s no end to it, no outcome, no conclusive moment when you say ‘That’s enough. I’m done. I’m satisfied from the phone experience.’ There’s only another app, another check, another potential notification.

It's a pathetic sight, really, that collection of people lined up, every one of them clutching a device, tapping and squinting away. Well, not every one of them, but a proportion over 60% that includes young and old, men and women, affluent and not so well off. The phone bug has infected most of them, piloting their eyes and fingers, bending their minds and bewitching them with nothing.

I’m getting fit now, anyway. I can do seven chin-ups and am improving my pull-up technique also. I have walked over 600,000 steps in April so far. I have dropped over five pounds in a month. I feel lighter, thinner, mobile, more present in my body. There’s a warm glow there every day, after I come home. I’m exhausted but warm and happy from the constant, steady exercise. The calming effects of the outdoors don’t hurt either… I love to look at it all: the sky and the rain and the crows.

My dream is to buy a house, an empty one for about thirty grand. Japan has thousands of these vacant, often dilapidated, residential structures, many of them with owners desperate to sell. They are called ‘akiya’, meaning empty house, and they have been rendered unwanted by circumstance. I’d love one so I can get a cat, which I am not allowed to do in my current rented accommodation.

If it’s dirty and old, I’ll do it up. If the wires don’t work, I’ll buy a generator. If the water pipes are busted, I’ll shower somewhere else. But I want to do it, get a rundown, shack-like old home in the Japanese countryside, if just for a place to stroke my cat…

These have been some stray thoughts, on a day I cleaned train stations.

Read Part 16 here.

And Part 14 is here.