Life in Shinjuku Station: My thoughts must be relaxed to be able to maintain

Hi all,

Let's talk about Shinjuku Station.  36 platforms, a dozen lines, countless cafes and a few full-on department stores.  A small city unto itself

Photo courtesy of wikimedia, go donate!!

The Guinness Book of World Records (which, by the way, was originally founded in order to be of use in bar bets--this is awesome) gives it the title of busiest transit center in the world, clocking it at 3.64 million people passing through every day.  And really, those were 2007 numbers, so by my adjustment we're looking at more like 3.85 these days

So hey, let's be clear that this is the entire population of the world in the year 1400*.  All of Medieval Europe, plus the Ming Dynasty in China and a still-strong Caliphate in the Middle East--passing through Shinjuku Station seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days per year.  Enough people to act out every drama from the entire world's ancient mythology put together, joined instead for the simple task of trying to get to work
*(ok that was kind of an unfair date to pick because the Black Death killed like a hundred million people in the 14th century.  Not to mention widespread famine, disease, and Mongols in China for most of that century and the previous one.  And widespread Mongols in the Caliphate.  Or, in summary, widespread famine, widespread disease, and widespread Mongols kind of everywhere for a good 200 years.  Apparently that was just a really bad two centuries for us.  But you get my point)

What does this mean?  It means full trains emptying out onto full platforms, crowding down full staircases and through full hallways:

It looks like this unceasingly for a few hours each morning and night during the rush hours

It means millions of people brushing shoulders, it means billions of fleeting interactions.  What does that mean for these people?

I feel very fortunate to be able to look at this from a slight distance, as a bit of an anthropologist.  Come to think of it, I guess that's a lot of what this entire blog is about (the rest, of course, is food).  Maybe that will change once I begin working full-time, but since there's no way I'm going the full-on salaryman route, I don't think I'll ever truly be a part of the rush hour crush.  I certainly am not bred to it like many of these Tokyoites

(You merely adopted the rush hour.  I was born in it, molded by it.  I didn't get personal space until I was already a man; by then, it was nothing to me but agoraphobia)

Perhaps the most Japanese thing I ever see is this:  A man, pressed as tight as people can press, one of literally a hundred people shoved into a single train car, closes his eyes and relaxes.  He sways back and forth with the movement of the train, no need to brace himself because there is literally not enough room for anyone to stumble.  His physical body doesn't even have clearly defined boundaries, the entire car condensed into a single organic entity.  And so instead he devotes all of his energies to creating psychic personal space by sheer force of will.  That person, who I see in dozens of men and women every time I end up in rush hour in Tokyo, is to me the epitome of what it means to live in Tokyo

And yet, from all that, I still have to believe that there is a part of this that brings people together instead of just training them to put up mental walls.  Teaches people to work together with respect and discipline.  Maybe I'm being idealistic, but I like to think that Shinjuku Station creates the kinds of teamwork that allow a tiny island to accomplish things in great disproportion to its size.  Those billions of tiny interactions with people you'll probably never see again (at least not knowing), they gotta mean something, yeah?




Today, I ended up walking down a stairway next to another guy, who happened to be wearing a Wu-Tang shirt.  I nudged him in the shoulder, and casually threw up the W at about waist-height.  "Wu-Tang?" he offered.  "Forever," I replied.  He turned right to go to his train, I turned left towards mine.  A second later, once we were more than a meter apart, we'd each blended back into the faceless mass.  That's how it is in Shinjuku

Noah out