OV China & Japan: Whose fucking hand is this!

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Over lege wagons gesproken ;)

Groet / Cees

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/04/china_v_japan_the_packed-train.php

China v. Japan: the packed-train factor

15 Apr 2009 11:15 am
Superficially Japan and China are similar; in nuance and operating details
they're generally opposites, as illustrated previously here. Kathy Kriger,
whom I knew in Tokyo twenty years ago and who now lives in Casablanca
(where she runs, no joke, Rick's Cafe), reminds me about an important
difference: What happens inside a packed train.

Japan's subways are flat-out more intensely crowded than anything I've
seen in China. In Tokyo, uniformed and white-gloved "packers" are normal.
The Beijing and Shanghai subways are merely "self-packed," with people
crowding their way in but without that extra ratchet-up of density that
only trained, professional packers can provide. In Tokyo I lived through
the scene below more often than I want to recall. (Photo from Encarta.)

Chikatetsu.jpg

Clearest sign that the photo was taken in Japan rather than China: Not the
packers but the next car-load of passengers, waiting punctiliously in
line!

As I recently mentioned, a very-crowded Beijing subway provides the
opportunity for petty theft. In Japan, it's more like petty... petting.
Kriger says:

    That brought back a flood of memories from Tokyo's train and subway
commutes.  My most vivid were from when I lived a year in Yokohama and
commuted into Tokyo first on the JNR Negishi-sen, the blue train.  The
worst was the morning, crammed in and unable to move - invariably
forced  to look over the shoulder of a guy immersed in a porno comic
book.  When it got too much I got out and boarded the next train.  But
robbery was never a problem, ever.

    My favorite story was forgetting my purse on the upper rack exiting in
Yokohama from the Yokosuka line enroute to Yokosuka - the end of the
line - and going there the next morning to retrieve my handbag and
sign a form verifying that everything was still there.

    We women didn't fear the pick pocketers so much as those who rode the
trains to take advantage of the crowded conditions to let their hands
wander.  I think it might have been Jean Pearce [a local writer] who
recounted a story when an outraged American woman, accosted on a
crowded subway, grabbed the offending hand, raised it and said in
Japanese, "Whose hand is this?

The porno-comic factor was such an omnipresent aspect of Japanese public
life that it drove my wife from a slow boil into outright constant rage
against adult males in general, including the one who happened to be
living in the same house. As for the "whose hand is this?" factor, that
was so common that there is a standard term for it in Japanese (chikan, or
in hiragana ちかん) and signs outside crowded stations
warning "beware of subway gropers." I don't think I ever saw a sign in
Japan warning against pickpockets.

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