STRANGERS ON A TRAIN

On this morning's commute the fellow sitting in the window seat beside me got off the train, so I moved to the window seat, freeing up an aisle seat beside a young woman who had been standing for several stops. Before sitting down, she looked around carefully to see if there was maybe another seat available. Not finding one she sat down, though she would have preferred to sit elsewhere.

Any westerner (though perhaps mainly males?) who commutes in Japan has experienced this, both with male and female passengers. I couldn't begin to count the number of times the seat next to me on the rush hour train was the last to be taken. I'd stopped paying attention to it long ago, or so I thought. But the other day I realized that I was still subconsciously aware of it when on the train home, while fully absorbed in a book, I nevertheless noticed that the last seat available was being taken by a hurried commuter several rows away! I had been second to last! The minishock had caught my attention.

It's generally not prejudice in the sense we know it in the West (where differences in appearance are not generally as stark as they can be here); it's more like tacit - even subconscious - non-inclusion, as though you're not really 'present' in the Japanese sense, since you're not Japanese. Though there may on rare occasions be some element of conventional prejudice involved, more likely it's simply the fear that the unreadable (and therefore unpredictable) foreigner might turn (horror of horrors!) and speak to the person next to him. It has been known to happen. (It's rare for a Japanese to talk spontaneously to strangers on trains (or anywhere else) in Japan; Hitchcock could never have made his movie here.)

Foreigners are clearly the most likely to turn and ask directions, or even (gulp) say something in English, French, German - who knows what - bringing undesired attention to the unfortunate person spoken to. And because foreigners are prominent and look different, they attract attention de facto, and whoever sits next to them will also by default attract attention, which is not desired.

As for me, I am a touch over 6 feet tall, 180 pounds, with long white hair and two earrings, dress differently and never wear suit and tie, so I certainly don't expect anyone in the exurbs to race to sit beside me. Still, I've been taking this particular train with these particular commuters at this particular time for a dozen years now, and when I lived in Kyoto, another same train for 15 years, so I've had some time to observe the phenomenon. (It's also interesting to be the passive cause of so many dilemmas.)

The phenomenon had at one point begun to slip beneath my notice, when one day a guy from California who worked at our office told me of the satisfaction he'd felt that morning upon watching two commuters race to get the second-to-last free seat across the aisle from him, the loser then having to bite the bullet and sit in the last seat beside the foreigner, knowing that the foreigner had observed the 'contest.' I recognized in my own history the experience of that particular satisfaction, though it hadn't really registered until the fellow mentioned it. It's a feeling akin to that I referred to above at discovering that the last seat hadn't been next to me.

Anyway, it's nothing personal, really, it's just that you're clearly not Japanese and therefore potentially problematic. Someone will probably sit next to you eventually. And it has its good side: there are times when you're the only person on the train with a whole seat all to yourself!