Clean/Lines

Good morning from Kyoto, my second to last good morning.  Despite how much I miss talking to people I have rather fallen in love with this town.  I know I`m going to miss it when I go home.  Isn`t that weird?  My last full day is today and tomorrow Thursday I`m moving to Osaka, which as I mentioned to someone today is something like the Detroit of Japan.  No offense whatever to either Detroit or Osaka, it`s just much more bustling and a working person`s town.

My only full day in Osaka is Friday because I`m flying back on Saturday.  So, I think I know what I`m doing with my only full day in osaka -- taking the train back to Kyoto and spending the day here.

I wanted to talk briefly about a couple of interesting features about Japan.  One is lines and the other is cleanliness.

I`ve seen clean countries before -- places where the housewives are out every morning sweeping the stoops, that sort of thing.  I remember in England looking at the sides of the train tracks as we went out to Cornwall and thinking how much litter there would have been in the US and how much there wasn`t there in west England.

I`ve never seen anything quite like Japan though.  There is of course no litter anywhere.  It was breezy the other day when I was visiting my friends in Tokyo and we went outside on the sidewalk to have our coffee and a little breeze came up and blew the little receipt off the table onto the sidewalk.  Tim and I immediately got up to pursue that little bugger all the way down the sidewalk (he nailed it with its shoe before it excaped).

There are no garbage cans to speak of.  Almost none anywhere.  That`s of course because nobody does any thing to create litter.  There are narrowly prescribed places where you can eat and drink, socially prescribed I mean, and they all have provisions for disposal.  Next to the ubiquitous drink machines (coke, water, tea, coffee, beer, sake, you name it) there are bottle disposal bins.

The thing that really got me was to see the shop proprietors sweeping what appeared to me to be already imaculate sidewalks.  I remember an older woman squatting on the sidewalk and nabbing, like a pigeon with crumbs at a park bench, little tiny pieces of gravel.  These are smaller than a bb.  Nobody was going to call her the messy shopkeeper on the block.

For those of you who know me well enough to be, well, I leave my room more or less spotless every morning.  Neat and tidy and everything at right angles.  I know THAT`s not going to last but it`s an example of the effect of Japan.

The cult of lines

The other thing is the lines.  They are so orderly.  There were large groups of what I took to be middle-school students waiting sitting on the (clean) sidewalk area in front of the station the other day, headed for some outing or other.  Each group of, what, 50, was not only in orderly rows but evenly spaced lines.  It looked like the Arlington Cemetery of Junior High students.  Group after group, row after row.  They were chatting and having a great time, but sitting on the (clean) ground in very nice neat lines.

A better example really is the 地下鉄 , the subway.   In the US (I am really not putting the US down when I do these things, or not intentionally.  I am just tring to give a frame of reference) when the subway stops the crowd trying to push on is repelled by the crowd trying to get off.  It is a charmingly American and utterly inefficient way to do it.  The Japanese have it figured out.  There are markings on the subway platform where the doors will be when the train stops.  People line up here in double lines.  The rest of the platform is utterly devoid of people, except for the rare foreigner (ahem) who hasn"t figured it out yet. 

Then when the doors open, what?  The right line steps to the right and the left line steps to the left, allowing the car to empty to its hearts content.  Then the lines go, single file, onto the subway. 

I wanted to talk a little about some other things today but time is up.  I will almost certainly be on tomorrow and hope to be on Friday. 

Thank you for reading my little blog.  It means a lot to me.  It gives me a much-needed connection home.