Keeping Up With Japan

Everyone lives in his own little world and unless he makes a special effort from time to time to enlarge it, there is a tendency with age for it to collapse in on itself and become yet smaller. It is for this reason that I sometimes read the Japan Times, for otherwise that country would not be on my horizon at all, despite its undoubted importance.

My view of Japan is full of clichés, if not entirely composed of them. I think of it as a very well-ordered place where these is little crime and no litter, where everyone has a refined aesthetic sense and makes the utmost use of space, and where politeness is universal. The women dress in kimonos and spend their days on the tea ceremony. Japan is also, in my imagination, stiflingly conformist.

It was therefore with some surprise that I read the main stories of the Japan Times for 5th January. The first had the headline Body found in suitcase along Taina River in Kawasaki: Police open murder probe after 46-year-old man is discovered.

Bodies found in suitcases are usually an indication that something is wrong, but I did not think that such suitcases were ever found in Japan. Whoever was responsible was, at the least, not deeply conformist. What They Fought for 1... McPherson, James M. Best Price: $1.98 Buy New $11.90 (as of 09:46 UTC - Details)

The next story was that of a man in Tokyo who pushed a woman onto a railway line.

A 39-year-old man was arrested Saturday for pushing an unacquainted woman off the platform onto the rail track at Tokyo’s JR Shinagawa Station…. The man from Osaka Prefecture has admitted to the charge of attempted murder saying that he wanted to spend the rest of his life behind bars, said the police who withheld his name citing a mental disorder.

The desire to shut myself away from the world occurs to me from time to time, though it is true that I generally think of other ways of becoming a hermit than pushing old ladies onto railway lines. I don’t think the desire to be shut away is in itself a sign of a mental disorder, rather it is a sign of world-weariness. Perhaps the man in the story wanted to have his cake and eat it: He wanted to shut himself away, but also wanted to be clothed and fed. Looking after oneself, after all, is a problem for hermits.

u201cThe Law,u201d u20... Bastiat, Fru00e9du00e9ric Best Price: $13.26 Buy New $15.25 (as of 09:46 UTC - Details) Having worked in a prison, I soon came to the conclusion that the only way in which imprisonment would be tolerable for me would be in solitary confinement. Not to be able to get away from other people, especially those not chosen by myself, would be for me a kind of torture. Enforced socializing is a terrible thing.

Where pushing people on Tokyo platforms is concerned, I conjure up in my mind’s eyes photographs from the 1960s, when men in uniforms with white gloves pushed crowds of commuters into the carriages of the Tokyo subway, squeezing them in until a tin of sardines would seem like a fête champêtre by comparison. I don’t know whether this is still done.

I thought that it was only in North America and western Europe that schizophrenics under treatment, in what is laughingly called “the community,” which is usually to say neglect, and under the influence of illicit drugs, push people from station platforms into the path of oncoming trains. I shall now have to revise my prejudices, which is always a painful thing to have to do.

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