Station of despair: What to do if you get stuck at end of Tokyo Chuo Rapid Line

My friends and family like to joke about "anywhere USA." There are places all across the US where the same design language, chain restaurants, etc are all the same. There will be some differences in local business and in political/religious signage, but otherwise, they are cookie cutter, somehow feeling basically the same from Anchorage AK to Tampa FL. Importantly, these are all connected by car line.

I think there are a few things that make Japan fascinating to anyone who lives in a car-oriented culture, and a very important aspect is that even the small, out of the way, rural towns are still connected via passenger train, which changes the relationship of the small town to the central hub in important ways like what's described in the article here. Getting off the train in a small town is very different than getting out of your car in a small town.

You can find this same dynamic in the US, btw. You'll find that old rural towns, that grow up connected to the central hubs by either boat or by passenger train, have a lot of the same charm and feel. But if things are developed along roads, there's no presumption about walkability: they are designed for people to get in their cars and go from one parking lot to another.

Anyway, I'm actually totally clueless about this and speculating with very little informed knowledge outside my lived experience. I should probably delete this comment.

I wonder if it's because of watching anime as a kid. I even love the look of Japanese alleys with lots of wires hanging above. I'm pretty sure it's because it was a common sight in anime that was different from my lived reality.

I have often wondered about this as well. I think the answer is, where else are you going to find a very small town, in the mountains, on a passenger rail line? For good measure throw in extensive local history (including historic sites), modern internet and cellular coverage, and maybe also some onsen.

Certainly there are a few to be had but (my impression) pretty much none in North America. Probably some places in Switzerland and Austria that tick most of those boxes which people seem to find similarly fascinating.

Orientalism / exoticism.

I live in a small decaying Japanese city and there is nothing fascinating about it. With a few exceptions, most Japanese cities and towns are really ugly.

Japan is beautiful, that's why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR_Y0XOin8Y

Eh, you see the same kind of romanticism about the French, Italian, Greek, Swiss countryside, to list just a few.

It’s more so that US small towns are deeply uninteresting since many have been hollowed out to have the same chains. Japan has followed the opposite model and promotes obscure regional specialties like an obsession.

Have you never taken public transit before? You're one of today's lucky 10000: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Pre-smartphone, or if you don't have a signal, you check the posted timetable. In any decent good transit system, every stop, even the tiny bus stops in the middle of nowhere, has an up-to-date timetable on display. In a complicated area with several lines, they may also have a map showing all the different lines.

Or - ask a human! A bus is driven by a driver, and they aren't omniscient, but they do know stuff because they have to drive buses every day. Worst case, they could point you to the right place to find routes and timetables. If they've got an hour to kill before they drive the next bus back, they know that.

Post-smartphone, you get out your smartphone and check the transit operator's website or app. Transit apps are pretty useful: input where you want to go, and it tells you the fastest route to get there, including where you need to change to a different vehicle. I normally use the app from my local transit company (BVG), or the nationwide one (Deutsche Bahn) for long-distance trips; aggregators like Google don't always have the latest information. In Germany there is some kind of data-sharing program run by the government so that any transit company can give you accurate information for any other company's services and plan a route involving multiple companies. This might not be the case where you live.

We have a decent app for bus schedules, that whole debacle could have been avoided by checking that app beforehand.

My son went on a school trip to Japan last year. Of all the amazing things he must have seen the 7-Elevens are what he talked about the most haha.

They bought 7-Eleven Australia, too.

I wouldn't say they're big in Thailand. Especially compared to the ever present 7/11.

Shoutout for Mister Donut in Thailand! Lived there two years and ate Mister Donut often -- I had no idea it started in the US.

We were happily surprised to find Tower Records in Tokyo! It was great.

And Yahoo search!

> we discovered the "joy" of a bidet in our hotel room. Upon returning home we immediately ordered a Toto

I’m pretty sure this story is replicated by anybody who visits Japan. Once you use a bidet you can’t go back.

I used to know a female comedian who hosted a comedy night once a month. She and her partner lived in Morden for the sole reason that she has fallen asleep on the tube and got stuck there so many times that they figured it was easier just to move there lol

I'm a vomiteer rather than a sleeper so I never have this problem. But I know people who slept and ended up in Cambridge.

Crewe native here. It’s a big town rather than a small Mountain village, but aside from that it would be a similar experience to the article. There’s modern Best Western across the street. Pubs open until midnight or 1ish. Indian restaurants accommodate after hours drinkers and diners until the wee hours. There is a 24 hour McDonalds and some late night garages for supplies.

You were fast asleep at Crewe and so you never knew That he was walking up and down the station;

> Did it again in the midst of winter, and the staff allowed me and the two other blokes to stay for the night in the next departing train with the heating on.

That’s a notably kind and humane gesture in the midst of winter.

In Copenhagen you could reasonably plan to go from the central station to, say, Høje Taastrup, but fall asleep and end up in Aalborg 5 hours and 400km away.

Høje Taastrup is a large suburb at the edge of Copenhagen, and the end of an S-train line, but anyone who lives there will know an intercity train is faster. Trains to Aalborg stopping at Høje Taastrup leave at 00:50 and at 02:50 tonight. The other suitable intercity and regional trains overnight are to nearer places, 150km or so.

But on the weekends the trains run 24 hrs a day, so schoneweide isn’t really a station of despair. It’s not even really that far out.

I once read that one of the reasons behind very straightfoward page layout on Japanese websites is a legacy of the internet-on-phone data services, screen sizes, and reading experience in the years before 2007/2008+, when the iphone and then android devices came out.

Japan had its own domestic ecosystem of IP data to phones and web browsing 2006 and earlier, but page rendering features were very rudimentary, and you had to keep the total data transfer sizes down or nothing would load properly.

Cleanliness is... mostly downstream of storefronts and the like picking shit up _all the time_.

Indeed, it’s the same in Singapore.

Despite the law and order reputation of Singapore, plenty of people regularly break laws there, including littering.

All you need to do is get off the tourist strips and you can walk down park paths with plenty of trash strewn everywhere.

What people don’t see is the army of foreign labor who is constantly picking this trash up.

The government is good at enforcement - if an area has problems with trash cameras get put up along with signs warning of the consequences, but if the cleaning staff were to disappear overnight it wouldn’t take more than 24 hours for Singapore to look quite untidy.

In terms of Western countries like the US, cleanliness does come down to an operations issue. Cleaners don’t come often enough, trash cans aren’t emptied enough and littering enforcement is weak. But it’s certainly possible to make the US as clean as Japan with surprisingly little increase in effort.

In most parts of Tokyo if you drop your wallet on the street somebody will chase you down to return it.

Umbrellas? Not so much. Stealing umbrellas is the official city pastime in Tokyo. Turn your back for one second and that thing will be gone. Report it to the cops and they'll just tell you to steal somebody else's.

This is definitely part of government job programs. Paying people to keep your cities clean has a lot of advantages.

You know how there are pictures of certain immigrants to NYC and other places in the early part of the XX century and they would show those people sweeping their stoops and sidewalks and generally keeping their neighborhoods tidy?

Well, in Japan, you still see that. Shop owners will go around their shop with a duster cleaning away any dust or cobwebs that might have sprung overnight. Awnings, signs, etc.

100% this. Tokyo seems impossibly clean compared to NYC but Shirahama has a grunginess that feels almost like the rust belt of America.

When I play Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio games like "Lost Judgement" or "Like A Dragon" I always find myself wondering if groping is a big deal over there.

As we all know though, low latency is often opposed to high throughput or efficiency. If the average person had to work one hour less each day but the toilets weren't spotless (but still clean enough), wouldn't that be a worthwhile trade?

Looks like many places in Europe to me

One thing that occurred to me recently is that Japanese book stores will wrap your books in paper to protect one's privacy while reading on mass transit. There are still some bookstores in Taiwan that still preserve this tradition as well.

There's quite a lot of interviews with western women on this subject on YouTube. Can't remember the channel.

I felt so incredibly safe in Japan and I don't remember even seeing a cop. As an American, that felt crazy to me for how large those cities are. I had some expectation of that but it still surprised me, particularly in the touristy nightlife districts with the street drinking.

Obviously seems like there might be some downsides to the culture that leads to this.

I mean, groping on the subway is a problem in New York City too. We just close our eyes and plug our ears while singing "hire more cops". A women-only car would be most welcome.

In New York people push other people onto the tracks for fun and we do little about it.

I don't know about clean, I saw hardly any (men) wash their hands after using the bathroom. Sometimes they'd wave their hands under the tap. Without turning it on.

Seemed more like obsession with being tidy than hygeinic.

Having travelled quite a bit in europe, I disagree. There are european towns with train stations that look similar clean. But not at all everywhere.

Eastern europe in general less. Norther europe more.

Western and southern europe is mixed. Graffiti I have seen quite a bit, but broken glass or other types of vandalism are sadly common, too.

> Looks pretty similar to what I'd expect to a regular European town.

Europe is not one country, and even within the same country, there may be big differences between regions, and within the city itself. Naples and Geneva for example are like polar opposites.

Japan is very uniform by comparison, and about as clean and well maintained as the best European cities, I'd say the US is about average by European standards, but with less variation. The general, very rough idea with Europe is that the further north you go, the cleaner it is.

I’ve been on a few business and pleasure trips to France, Italy and Spain was struck by the volume of graffiti.

Way more than in NYC or Boston today, it reminded me of NYC when I was a kid in the 80s.

Things are actually open. In Switzerland everything closes. Japan is notable because there’ll be people everywhere and things will still be clean. Compare football games as example.

Don't bother :) There are other examples, but the US/HN audience is particularly fascinated with Japan in a "if you have to pick one" kind of way. Perhaps also because it's an old adversary.

It's much better than 0 outside benchmarking, so I've learned to just let these threads roll on.

I have not had any such problems living here for 7 years… elevators always have signs all over the station telling you exactly where to go to get to them, with standardized coloring and symbols, and text saying what it’s about in Japanese and English. They tell you even while you’re on the train which car the elevator will be in front of.

I would chalk up your experience to being generally overwhelmed and not used to it, mixed in with being illiterate in the local language (despite there being English and symbols to assist further).

I notice that too, just carrying luggage around. Same with pedestrian overpasses some places. Overall, I’d say Japan is noticeably less accessible than the US or western Europe.

It's hard to find anything in the large stations. Shinjuku station is mad. It's like a confluence of 12 rivers.

There's a sign in Otsuka (northern Tokyo suburb) like "Otsuka has half the crime rate of 10 years ago!" Things are the way they are, up until the moment that they change.

Things can change if people will it into existence. My 2-bit belief is basically simplified "broken window theory", where stuff being broken leads to more stuff being broken, trash leads to more trash... so dealing with cleaning stuff up quickly is good.

Generating an environment where people have some pride in what's around them and are also benefiting from the thing themselves, on top of the thing not being busted probably helps a lot.

There's a lot of anti-littering campaigns and the like. I feel like the gov'ts as a whole are pretty responsive to new kinds of crime and try to build a public consciousness against it as soon as they realize what's up.

Plenty of hooliganism in Japan all over, and plenty of raging, but at the end of the day if there's a nice bench that someone is allowed to sit on in a chill way, people probably tend to not take their rage out on it.

Maybe everyone in Tokyo is just ground down from having to work all the time and is just subservient to authority. Who knows!

Simply put: because it's full of Japanese people.

Everybody speaks the same language and has the same cultural norms, which are the foundations for any high-trust society.

Japanese culture has an exceedingly high focus on the appearance of cleanliness and politeness. The inside of someone's home might be a hoarder's dream, but the outside will be clean.

Someone might be an absolute jerk, but to act on that in most social spaces would have very real consequences. Rude behavior, like dancing and playing loud music on a train, will get you arrested here.

Misbehavior in Japan is dealt with, and quickly.

On that note: Japanese police don't play games. You do not have a right to a speedy trial, there is no jury of your peers, and they can hold you as long as they'd like. The phrase "police brutality" does not translate into Japanese.

Do not break the law in Japan.

There is a de-facto truce between the Yakuza and the police, as the Yakuza deal with foreign gangs and other problems that would be... difficult to solve with normal police work.

Japanese gangs are fiercely nationalistic. If the police don't handle you, the Yakuza will, and although I don't have any data to back this up, I'd wager that the police are the better option.

Additionally, Japanese neighborhoods have social responsibilities. Every couple of months, I am responsible for cleaning our trash area for two weeks, and there's usually some kind of repair or cleanup event twice per year.

In Japan, many people have lived in the same place for multiple generations, and can trace their ancestry within Japan back for thousands of years.

Japan is, quite literally, their ancestral home, and they act like it.

Strong vs weak sense of obligation to the collective (the people around you).

Culture and mentality. They don't have the same urge to vandalize or graffiti. Same as Singapore.

They are much more united and much less diverse in various ways. While they have many subcultures, they mostly adhere to a greater social cohesion.

To make up for that a bit, they do allow people to get plastered and spray vomitus publicly, including public transit and no one bats an eye. That said, you don't get the public defecation that we get.

Even their bums tend to take care of themselves as best they can. They try to maintain a certain decorum despite their dire circumstances.

Americans, in a sense, lost quite a bit of their sense of shame.

At the risk of stereotyping an entire nationality, Japanese culture puts a high degree of emphasis on conformity, obeying rules, obeying social hierarchies and keeping things in a generally orderly fashion.

For instance, many Japanese primary public schools have no janitor. This is normal. The children scrub the floors, bathrooms and do all the other cleaning tasks in a defined schedule.

some random reference examples: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=japanese+...

It is part of Japanese culture. Even in elementary school the children clean their own classrooms.

https://youtu.be/jv4oNvxCY5k

American individualism

Way more of a hive mind mentality and indoctrination. Expression individualism and going your own way is actively discouraged.

I used to have a really long commute when I lived in Tokyo and would regularly nap on the train. I was always amazed (and grateful) when I would wake up just as the train pulled into my station.