WORKING IN JAPAN: PT. 27

Needles and heat

To recap, there are three managers at the dispatch office I go to every morning:

1. Harry. A convivial young man eager not to offend.

2. Skeletor. A mellow and accommodating middle-aged guy.

3. Non-Skeletor. Although a separate biological entity, Non-Skeletor looks very similar to Skeletor, like he has copied his face.

Number three is the roughest-speaking and the tensest, but they’re all basically OK. Anyway, it was Harry and Skeletor who gave the morning address today. There were two main topics: medical waste and the weather.

Some commuters, it seems, have been discarding needles in the train station trash. Japan doesn’t have a rampant smack-shooting problem, so the syringes are probably coming from diabetics, but it’s happening enough that Skeletor warned us to be careful.

If you find any needles, report them, we were told. And if you stab yourself, you should squeeze around the point of puncture to expel any affected blood. Then it’s off to the hospital for tests. I have resolved, henceforth, to lift garbage bags only by the slack surplus plastic at the top, and never by cradling them from underneath. My hand won’t be a pin cushion for mystery needles for an hourly wage of twelve hundred yen!

The second item on the agenda was heat. It’s hotter than usual for May, we were told, and fan vests are on their way. These are like workman’s jackets with fans built in, and they look like they would be effective at staving off heatstroke. I’ve seen them in action, switched on and puffed up like a torso-shaped balloon. I can’t wait to get my fan vest because this summer is definitely going to hit forty Celsius.

In fact, by the time I left the dispatch office for Big Station the weather was already threatening to get hot. Though the day never quite kept this promise, I did manage to work up my first sweat of the year. It was the kind of heat that leaves you alone if you play dead, but, as soon as you move around, it gets in your underpants. By mid-afternoon, I had a salt lake forming in my nether zones and thighs as chafed as a new mother’s nipples. After today, I’ll be investing in Vaseline or a different type of pants!

On the subject of walking around, it never ceases to amaze me the number of perfectly healthy motherfuckers who will ride an escalator to avoid ascending twenty steps. Able-bodied men and women between the ages of twenty and fifty years old will crowd the escalator in a cramped, continuous stream while the short flight of steps beside it stays practically vacant.

I understand it on a warmish day like today, especially if you’re wearing a suit, but this is the case nearly always: dozens of people lining up to ride the escalator, queue extending twenty feet from the base, while the stairs go nearly unused. Only when a million people pour off one of the trains, and the escalator becomes a monstrous, wretched clusterfuck, does any significant volume of human traffic flow onto the steps.

I drink a lot of water at work because I worry about dehydration and heatstroke. You have to think about these things more and more as the world gets hotter. According to one article I read, something like 21 out of the last 22 months have been more than 1.5C over the estimated pre-industrial average temperature. Is it safe to work outside? Am I going to be fried AND stabbed to bits by insulin needles?

Ultimately, I suppose, cleaners will be replaced by robots. That, or AI will design a self-cleaning station building. I imagine it would be feasible to blueprint a structure that self-irrigates with disinfecting fluids, wipes itself down, and vacuums the trash out through vents in the floor. I don’t know what work I would do then because once AI has done away with cleaners there won’t be very much left. Maybe I could professionally donate blood or serve as a battery cell, etc.

This stuff was on my mind after seeing the Google Veo 3 videos today (I had a quick look at social media while lurking in the broom closet). AI-generated video has become so realistic that I’m scrutinising every moving image before I believe it. Not only is this an inconvenience and a ball ache that adds a few seconds of suspended judgement to every viewing experience, but it’s also a disconcerting reminder of how rapidly entire professions can be disrupted. Technology is galloping ahead faster than my ability to speculate what it might do, and I think every worker, every person participating in the economy, will be deeply affected.

In my nightmares, the future is a baking, cashless, AI-driven moron farm in which everyone talks to each other through ChatGPT. Want an email? ChatGTP. Love letter for your girlfriend? Grok. Coffee shop chats could be streamlined using an app that finishes people’s sentences in a computer-generated simulation of their voice because the cumulative cognitive atrophy of outsourcing basic brain functions to AI has left them unable to do it for themselves. Human beings will devolve into semi-mute depositories for drinking yoghurt, standing in the corner while machines design their own upgrades.

Anyway, back to the weather… My legs did get sore from the sweat today, but it wasn’t a full-force summer ordeal. And I was happy as I swept the floor, face damp with beads of perspiration.

Happy enough to be singing.

The next part of this blog is here, and…

You can read Part 26 of this series here.