Raw Japan

Mind your train manners

Taking the train in Japan and want to avoid irking fellow passengers? Keep conversation to a whisper, turn down your iPod and put your cellphone on vibration mode.

When it comes to ridership manners on Japan’s vast network of subways and commuter trains, many foreign visitors have complained to me about the pushing and shoving and reluctance to give up seats for senior citizens and pregnant women.

But for local riders noise is the biggest issue, with loud conversation and music from headphones the top two offenders and cellphone ringtones in fourth place, a survey on train manners by a railway association showed.

Applying make-up ranked as the sixth-biggest breach of rail etiquette, worse than drunkeness at No.9, which just edged out bringing strollers onto crowded trains, according to the survey by the Association of Japanese Private Railways.

As for me? Nothing annoys me more than when the guy sitting next to me falls asleep and tries to use my shoulder for a pillow!

Here are the top 10 examples of bad rail manners according to the association’s online survey, with responses from about 4,200 people:

A carriage too far

What are the odds, but on the morning after a few Seibu shareholders asked the transport firm to offer male-only rail cars to avoid the stress of possible train groping allegations, I mistakenly walked into the women-only car in Shibuya during the crowded rush hour.

Whoops, I suddenly realized - no blue suits and ties, discarded racing newspapers and pornographic manga, or slumped-over passengers letting neighbours support their weight, and it smelled decidedly better. Something was dreadfully wrong.

In that millisecond it takes to sense your toe in boiling bath water, I implemented immediate retreat operations, trying to moonwalk out of the carriage without creating an international incident.

I had seen Masayuki Suo’s movie “I Just Didn’t Do It” and interviewed the director, who researched cases of false groping accusations, and I knew Japan’s legal system wasn’t where I wanted to take my chances with “innocent until proven guilty”, particularly in a car where I was already persona non grata.

While Yojiro Takita, the Japanese director who won the Academy Award for best foreign film earlier this year, may have made a pre-Oscar franchise of adult movies involving molesters on trains, public opinion on this serious issue is loud and clear: Rail travel in Japan is horrific enough without roaming hands.