WORKING IN JAPAN: PT. 22

Details of the job/feeling poor/a low quality beard

This job makes you 9,000 yen a day but at least they leave you the fuck alone. Here is what I do for that money:

Just after 8am, I go to the dispatch office. Then there’s a train ride to the first of the two stations I’ll clean that day.

Cleaning a train station involves:

- Emptying all the bottles and cans from the trash cabinets attached to each vending machine (usually 7-10 in a station).

- Sweeping all platforms, flights of stairs, concourses, and the insides of any elevators

- Wiping the belts and stainless steel housing of any and all escalators (using one colour of cloth)

- Wiping all stainless steel fittings and structural components – such as ticket counters, handrails, and metal side banks on the stairways – within the station (using a differently coloured cloth)

- Removing all trash from toilet cubicles and filling up the paper dispensers

On good days, I throw myself into this routine for all I’m worth. On other days, I wonder what parts of it are reasonable to skip. For example, the stairs aren’t always dusty or dirty and then it doesn’t matter if you simply remove any dropped food wrappers or receipts and cigarette butts from them and call it a day. Certain pieces of the escalator housing never meet with human hands, so they don’t require the most conscientiously regular sanitising… and so on. I’m a moody fucker sometimes, but I’ll always give it a minimum of 65%.

Financially, things aren’t great. Out of the 9,000 yen I mentioned, I tend to put down about 1,500 a day on coffee and lunch from 7-11. Sooner or later, I’ll have to start bringing sandwiches, or pasta and salads I made myself. Homemade packed lunches, for the record, are not something I romanticise as cosy, comforting and down-to-Earth. If I had my druthers, I’d continue eating machine tooled, chemically enhanced bullshit from the convenience store.

I cannot stress how much I adore being unsupervised. Freedom to go chill in the storage closet is priceless. Is it OK to take long breaks if the money is really bad, I ask? I think we know the answer to that!

Indeed, today I was in the storage closet, scrolling some shit on my phone. Then something completely new happened: the door slid open, revealing another cleaner I shall call The Rock. He’s a massive person, like a chunk of cliff face that’s come loose from an aerial bombing.

‘I’m just taking a break,’ I said, thinking the dispatch office had sent him to check up.

There was no reaction as he moved into the closet.

‘In about five minutes I’ll go sweep the platform,’ I continued, trying to impress upon him that I was taking a planned, not impulsive, rest and would have been back to work soon whether he had come by or not, ‘Are you working this station today?’

‘I’m going here and there. Have you finished taking out the trash?’ The Rock jiggled the trash cart.

‘Yes,’ I told him, assuming he was checking if I’d completed the morning’s tasks properly.

But he didn’t say anything, and dragged the cart away. The closet door closed and I sat there, playing on my phone. I waited five minutes and went outside to the platform, broom in hand.

The Rock, it turned out, didn’t give a whip of drool if I’d been slacking off. He was pumping air in the tyres of the cart, and that’s why he had asked if I was done with it. Then he fucked off and I didn’t see him again.

Neither have the three managers – Skeletor, non-Skeletor, and Harry – been riding me. I keep thinking they’ll ask what I’m doing, or try and come watch me clean… but nope. Unless they find the after-effects of a mistake I’ve made they leave me completely alone. I’ve been cultivating a scruffy beard, an unsightly, untrimmed week’s worth of style-free facial hair, the kind of brush that would occasion a warning or disgruntled comment from the office boss of a sales department, but they’ve said nothing of it. The beard is long enough to be instantly noticeable but insufficiently lengthy to be pleasing or fashionable.

One of my coworkers, a very nice gentleman who brought cookies (let’s call him Nice Guy Charlie), remarked on the growth this morning. We were on our way out from the dispatch office.

‘Your beard is getting thick,’ said Nice Guy.

‘Yeah. I should probably shave it, huh?’

Nice Guy Charlie laughed but said nothing.

‘I bet they’ll say something to me about it…’ I went on.

Nice Guy continued smiling. There was not so much as an implication that he had an opinion.

‘I don’t see you much,’ said NGC.

‘Yeah. But it’s good working alone. Can’t stand having my boss around all day.’
‘Yeah, that sucks,’ said Charlie.

We entered the station where we all ride off on different trains, and he fucked off and I didn’t see him all day.

In other news, I looked for updates on Wednesday’s Namboku Line stabbing suspect (read the previous part of this series for background). I couldn’t find anything but I did try and google how often this happens – knife attacks on Tokyo’s transport system. A cursory skim of old news stories suggests they occur every two or three years.

There was one in 2024, for instance, when a woman stabbed and injured four guys on a Yamanote Line train just before 11pm. For those that don’t know, the Yamanote Line is a circular, extremely busy, train line that loops around central Tokyo, connecting many of the city’s major commercial and business districts. The woman did not know the men she attacked.

‘I boarded a train from Ueno Station. I stabbed (them) with the intention of killing people,’ she said, and explained that she was mentally ill on the off chance that no one had guessed.

An even bigger knifing happened in 2021 on a Keio train in Western Tokyo, when a 24-year-old man injured at least seventeen people. Dressed as the Joker, he also set fire to the train with cigarette lighter fluid and told investigators he ‘wanted to kill people and be given a death penalty’.

There was another one on the Odakyu Line in 2021, in which ten people were injured so maybe it all averages out to one every eighteen months… Even so, these are extremely isolated incidents in a safe and courteous country. And I feel good working here.

What should I make for my packed lunch?

You can now read Part 23 here.

The previous part of this series is here.