OH, THE TRAVESTY...

During our 30-minute sojourn in the 60-years-ago train station where we spent a half hour looking at the past (as chronicled in CHICHIBU YOMATSURI III below), I took a picture of one of the things in the station that fascinated me most: a framed replica of a kiseru (brass-and-bamboo smoking pipe), prominently featured in a severe admonition to the train-riding public to cease committing an egregious and chronic violation of the long-suffering railway system. But first a little explanation...

When we got our tickets for the train and went through the wicket the ticketwicketer, as I said, actually took each ticket in his hand and just like 50 years ago punched it with a puncher that made a notch unique to that station, so that when we handed it in at the other end the wicketer there would know where we had entered the line and could tell that we had paid the full fare, an antique way of trying to thwart the folks who have always tried to fool the train system by various means, such as by handing in a ticket much closer to their destination than where they actually came from, in a traditional Japanese scam perpetrated by the public on the railway system since its inception.

The fact that this scam is historical and has been perped for a long time is reflected in the name it's called, that comes from way back when folks still smoked those edo-style pipes, in the same vein of folk-irreverence that attends so many things in Japan, an irreverence reflected in the folk-terms for those things, an acknowledgment that Yes, we do pull such things off; collectively that is, not individually.

As represented by certain unidentified members of the public, we do work to get a free ride when we can, and here is what we call that process so we can talk about it, all anonymously of course, for I myself, like all my relatives and friends (this said with an inward smile) would never do such a dishonest thing. This railroad station sign is not speaking to me, it's speaking to the others, to the unscrupulous folks who still try to get through life's journey a bit more cheaply, the dastardly anonymous warriors in the fight to keep prices down where they belong... and so we call this process kiseru... after the old brass smoking pipes with bowl and mouthpiece of shiny (and expensive) brass, and the length between them of cheap bamboo, so poetically like the free ride in the middle... There is so much depth of metaphor there, so much collectively anonymous artisanship, so much transcendant wisdom and humor...

As to result in an old finger-wagging sign in the station to that very effect, basically showing folks how it's done while asking them not to do it, not to commit this heinous practice in this way demonstrated right here, that cuts heavily into the railroad porkbarrel; which just goes to show that even the railroad folks are tacitly in on the big collective joke being played on no one in particular, and this is their token way of doing something about this lamentable travesty...