WORKING IN JAPAN: PT. 18

Lunatics in the rain

Before the iPhone came to Japan there was the ‘garakei’, a super-advanced (for the time) genre of flip-top cell phone you could use to send emails, take pictures, and, depending on the model, watch TV. The ‘gara’ part was from the word Galapagos, and the ‘kei’ was from ‘keitai’, the Japanese word for mobile phone. The portmanteau ‘garakei’ referred to a thing of beauty found only on a handful of islands, much like some Galapagos birds.

Anyway, enter the iPhone, harbinger of extinction for the garakei. Everyone has an iPhone in Japan now, much like the rest of the world, and the domestic cell phone market isn’t all that’s been disrupted. Japanese makers of cameras, calculators, music players, electronic dictionaries and Dictaphones have all been deeply affected by Apple’s multi-purpose monster. I used to talk about it, from time to time, with the Tokyo-based mega-corporations I would visit to discuss market research.

Today I pondered all of this, and the garakei of early-2000s Japan, after once again seeing so many people zombified by their iPhones. When I am riding the train to work, I am in my uniform and cannot fiddle with my own device on company time. And I’m not allowed to look at it as I sweep up the station platforms either. That means I am glancing around, people watching and really noticing what’s become of the human race. There are lines of lines of people, waiting for their trains, all of them blank-faced and scrolling.

On today’s ride to work there was a group of boys, five of them, standing in a circle. They talked and laughed a little, though each was looking at his screen. You see this in restaurants too: groups of friends with their heads in different worlds.

Much of the time now, we find transmitted information more interesting than the physical environment around us, even though that’s not the way we evolved. It can’t be good for us to operate this way, hunting for dopamine among pixels, hungering for satisfaction in virtual spaces. It feels like a recipe for irritability, anhedonia, and fractured attention spans.

These are the types of thoughts I have when watching people, and today I was mulling things over as usual when I noticed someone in our company uniform lurking behind one of the pillars on the station platform. It was non-Skeletor, and I said hello. He reacted awkwardly, causing me to suspect that he was spying. I told him I was about to wipe the elevators and he didn’t seem to know what to say. I wondered what he was up to.

I wiped the elevators and some other stuff and went over to the opposite side of the station, where non-Skeletor popped up again on the other platform. He asked me if I had wiped the stainless steel above a certain flight of stairs and I said yeah. Then he asked if I had wiped a separate stainless steel part of the building and I said yes again. I judged him ready to continue this line of questioning with unwavering consistency, asking about a series of other steel surfaces, and so I forestalled him.

‘If it’s made of stainless steel, I’m wiping it!’ I informed him.

He went quiet.

A Japanese employee would have just said ‘hai, hai’ (yes, yes) so I don’t think he expected a more elaborate response. I wondered how I sound to him, with my foreign accent, replying in a way that could be construed as slightly sarcastic. For some reason, I imagine him hearing me how we hear a Russian accent, and internally replayed the scene with a big Russian guy, cloth in hand, staring right through him:

‘If it’s made of stainless steel… I’m wiping it.’

In other news, I flicked a piece of poo from the metal bank on one side of a flight of steps, almost hitting a woman. It was bird shit, as usual, and congealed enough that I could accidentally knock it through the air with my cloth. I didn’t know it would take flight, and I pretended not to realise when the lady looked at me. If she had been struck in the face, it would have made for an epic disciplinary hearing.

During cloth time, I went down by the bus stops on my way to the back of the building. There’s a tradesman’s entrance I use as a shortcut there, and I was approached by a batshit eccentric old woman of seventy.

‘I used to work for your company,’ she said, ‘Where are you from?’

‘England.’
‘What’s your name?’

I showed her my name tag.

‘That’s a funny name,’ she said, ‘You’re going round the back way, aren’t you? I used to work with – what’s her name again? That woman. I used to work with her. I know where your office is. Yeah, at one station some girls went in the toilet together and didn’t come out for half an hour. I wonder what they were doing. Do you have an umbrella?’
She was following me towards the back of the station.

‘What?’ I said, ‘You want an umbrella?’
‘You have them, right? Out the back? Umbrellas.’

The old lady was carrying an umbrella as she said this.

‘They’ve all gone upstairs to the station staff,’ I said, ‘I can’t give you one.’
‘You have them. There’s loads.’
‘They’ve gone to the station staff. Anyway, I can’t go giving out umbrellas.’
She gave up then, smiling. Her rambling, excitable tone betrayed that her marbles were far out to sea.

‘OK…’
‘I have to go now. Let’s meet again one day!’
‘Bye!’

I returned to the station and finished wiping all the precious steel. It began to rain more heavily, millions of droplets drumming the roof. I felt profound peace, slowly pacing in air stirred by the downpour. There was twisted beauty in thoughts of how much more rain I would see in my life.

At Injury Station, where I went in the afternoon, a weird old man came up to me. Mumbling and incoherent, he started on about umbrellas too. He spoke like his own dick was in his mouth, but I ascertained that he was telling me someone had left some umbrellas near the seating.

‘I’ll take them to the station people,’ I said.

‘Where are you from?’

‘England.’
‘I knew it.’
‘I like working outside…’ I offered.
‘I bet you’ve been here less than a year.’
‘Twenty years.’
‘Wow,’ he said, and jumped on a train.

I didn’t know how to take that. Injury Station was weird sometimes, in terms of its people. Lots of cranks and chatty oddballs, sudden conversations and random encounters. A few days ago, there was a lesbian porno DVD in the station trash, cover art clearly visible through the near-empty garbage bag. It was sat in my work area, proud as the daytime sun, waiting for me to dispose of it. I carried it through the public concourse, turned against my leg so no one could see. A nicely-shod, classy, well-to-do woman of fifty or over chanced by, then, and I had an urge to give her the movie.

‘Excuse me…’ I would bow, handing it over, ‘Is this yourrrrssss, madam?’

I would have been sacked outright for that one, unless it was her DVD.

Read Part 19 here.

And you can catch up on Part 17 here.