Escalator Wars - Making a mountain out of a moving mole-hill エスカレーター・ウォーズ －動くモグラ塚から山を作る－

 “All they say is ‘Please mind the doors’,
And they learn that on the two day course.
This job could be done by a four-year old;
They just leave us freezing in the cold.
What you smell is what you get:
Burger King and [pee]and sweat.
You roast to death in the boiling heat,
With tourist treading on your feet,
And chewing gum on every seat,
So don’t tell me to ‘Mind the gap’:
I want my [bloody] money back!”
From parody song “London Underground” by Amateur Transplants
 

How many angry blogs have been written about public transport?  It seems like a topic with unlimited possibilities for anger.  There’s the way perfectly healthy people fight for seats in the priority section, the crazy rush-hour train experience in big cities, and etiquette controversies surrounding the use of phones, passengers putting on make-up and so on.  But recently on the London Underground there is a controversy before you even get on the train.

It is about walking on the station escalators.  Up to this point, the etiquette in Britain has been to encourage people who wished to stand to move to the right side of the escalator, and for others to walk past them on the left side of the escalator.

Common sense surely shows that walking up escalators is more annoying than useful.  Do you really have to barge past me, wildly swinging elbows, a briefcase and an umbrella, just to get to the top 5 seconds earlier?  If you’re that keen on mountaineering, couldn’t you instead climb a mountain, or at least the stairs?

In fact, research now shows that you’re not even getting to the top five seconds faster.  Especially if it is a long escalator, you are actually getting there more slowly.  Or at least on average most people will get to the top more slowly.  When London Underground experimented with an escalator on a crowded platform, they found that making everyone stand greatly improved efficiency.  The number of passengers able to use the escalator in one hour rose from 12,745 to 16,220.  One reason is that for long escalators, most people want to stand.  But splitting the escalator into two sections reduces standing room by half.  This results in longer queues and more difficulty getting on the escalator at the bottom.

So given this research showing the clear benefits of having everyone stand, London commuters must have been quick to embrace the changes, right?

Nope.  As you can tell by reading the lyrics to the song “London Underground” at the top of the page, people don’t necessarily have any great respect for the hard workers in the Underground.  Aggressive commuters, used to barging past elderly passengers felt cheated.  A spokesperson for the Underground said, “Passengers just don’t like having these things changed.”

The Underground staff were scared that if they wore their uniform and blocked the left “walking lane”, they might be physically attacked.  So instead, the station employed people to stand at the bottom of the escalator with a loudspeaker encouraging commuters not to walk.  They also had staff members disguised as commuters standing in the left lane to block anyone who tried to walk.  There was still some initial difficulty and resistance.  Staff saw one commuter pushing a standing child out of the way so that he could keep walking to the top.  What kind of person would do that?  Did he think he was fighting his way to the top of Mount Everest?

The next time you ride an escalator on the Underground, I’d like you to take a good look around.  There’s more going on than you might have realised. 

Vocabulary:

To make a mountain out of a mole-hill – to make a big issue out of a small matter; to overreact

“Please mind the doors.” – “Please be careful of the doors.”; a phrase often broadcast to commuters on the London Underground

To tread – to step

To barge (past) – to aggressively or forcefully move (past)

To be keen on – to like or enjoy

 

 

 

Oh Hell, I’m in Heaven －ちくしょう、天国にいるんだ－

“Lucifer protests he was never to blame for [making] anyone sin, and that he’s never had an interest in owning souls: They die and they come [to Hell]... and expect us to fulfil their desire for pain...  I don’t make them come here.  I need no souls.”

From Neil Gaiman’s comic series, “Sandman” 

“We are each our own devil, and we make this world a hell.”
Oscar Wilde

“An intelligent Hell would be better than a stupid Paradise.”
Victor Hugo

I recently featured an extract from the short story, “The spider’s thread”, written by Ryunosuke Akutagawa.  The story revolves around the notorious criminal Kandata.  He is in Hell, but the Buddha takes pity on him because he remembers Kandata performing one small good deed.  The Buddha lowers a spider’s thread for Kandata to use to climb out of Hell.  All seems to be going well as Kandata climbs half-way out.  But then he looks back and sees thousands of others climbing out behind him.  Worried that the weight of these others will cause the thread to snap, he shouts at them to get off.  Then, presumably because of this further selfish act, the thread snaps and Kandata falls back into Hell.

There the story ends.  But I recently read a great article in Japanese which asks what could happen next.  Would the Buddha take pity on Kandata for a second time, and again try to help him out of Hell?  What if Kandata climbs all the way to Heaven, either alone or with the thousands of other damned souls behind him?

The writer of the article speculates that Heaven is a peaceful place of poetry, philosophy, lotus ponds, and a Buddhist atmosphere of abstinence and calm.

He further speculates that Hell, as the opposite of Heaven, must be a place of wild desires and materialism.  In Hell, the damned souls collect gold.  The demons try to put them to work, but can be bribed to allow clever and ambitious souls amongst the damned to shirk their work, drink smuggled alcohol and to carouse with members of the opposite sex.

You can imagine then that if Kandata and his party ever reached Paradise, they might be disappointed.  They would get bored in Heaven, and pester the Buddha to provide bars, gambling dens and other entertainments.

The moral of this article is that Heaven and Hell are in the mind.  You can look at your circumstances and judge yourself to be in Heaven.  Or another person could look at the same circumstances and judge themselves to be in Hell.  It’s a matter of perspective and attitude.

It may well be that this world that we live on is Hell.  Perhaps we’ve all tried Heaven once and found that we didn’t like it.  There are demons on the Earth, tasked with making our lives miserable.  Are they the lawyers?  The politicians?  Middle managers?  I’m not sure.  But there’s no point in wishing for Paradise.  The best we can do is to shirk our work whenever possible and take our pleasures where we can.  At least Hell has better music than the other place.

 

Vocabulary:

Lucifer – In Christianity, another name for the Devil

to revolve – to go around; if a story revolves around A, then A is the centre of the story

abstinence – denial of something pleasurable, such as alcohol or fine food

to bribe – to pay money in return for a favour; to make a corrupt payment

to shirk – to avoid something one is responsible for, such as work or a duty

smuggled – secretly imported or brought in

to carouse – to drink alcohol and enjoy oneself with others in a noisy and lively way

to pester – to annoy, especially in a persistent way

 

 

Dealing with priority seat Nazis －優先席ナチスの扱い－

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Edmund Burke

“The only thing necessary for old people to be left standing is for young people not to give up their seats.”
William Lang

In Japan, people patiently wait their turn in queues.  After a natural disaster, people calmly help one another, without the chaos and looting often seen in other countries in such situations.  There are plenty of great examples of the good order kept and manners shown in Japanese society.

So why then does practically no one give up their seat on the train to the elderly, disabled, pregnant, and so on?  Even people sitting on the priority seats will pretend to sleep while a bent old lady hobbles around in front of them.  University students will pull out a banana and start munching happily while a heavily pregnant woman stands in front of them, trying not to throw up as the motion of the train exacerbates her morning sickness.

What would it take for these priority seat Nazis to actually stand up?  If a one-legged blind man hopped forward, trying not to drop his newborn baby twins as he made desperately for the priority seats, would the perfectly healthy salary man sitting there get up?  I doubt it.  He would certainly panic for a moment.  But then he would close his eyes, certain that if he pretends he hasn’t seen the guy coming then he can’t be held responsible.

So is there any solution?  I propose that the government issue a priority seat card.  Like a driver’s license or other official ID card, you would have to apply for it at the ward office.  They would be given automatically to pensioners, the disabled and expecting mothers.  Then a glass door would be built around the priority seats in all train carriages.  You could only get into the little compartment if you swiped your card over a lock at the door.  No doubt some salary men would get their hands on the cards by going to the ward office and feigning injury.  But at least they would have to positively act to keep their priority seat, rather than just closing their eyes and avoiding all responsibility.

Maybe the cost of such a scheme is prohibitively expensive.

So perhaps the trains could install speakers behind the priority seats which played enka (an old style of Japanese folk-pop) all day long.  This would help to remind healthy young people that these seats are not designed for them.

Or maybe the elderly and the pregnant can just sit down on the laps of the young and healthy people taking up the seats.  Once he has been sat on by a heavily pregnant woman, even a priority seat Nazi will soon learn some manners. 

Vocabulary:

triumph – victory; success

looting – the stealing of goods when law and order has broken down, such as during a riot

to hobble – to walk with difficulty, such as with a leg injury

to munch – to chew

to exacerbate something – to make something, such as a problem, worse

to hop – to move forward on one leg by making small jumps

to feign (injury) – to pretend (to be injured)

prohibitively (expensive) – too (expensive) to be done, achieved etc.

 

Hi there, Sweet-Lips! Would you like to date me now, or would you like to date me later? －そこのかわい子ちゃん、今すぐ僕とデートしますか？または、後で僕とデートしますか？－

I am being harassed.  All I want to do is go about my daily business – check my emails, write lesson plans, look up some things on the internet etc.  But while I am doing this, I keep getting messages from the same old man throughout the day.  He won’t take no for an answer.  I have tried to ignore him but he’s very persistent.  He sometimes even takes control of my computer and forces me to visit his web-site.

I wondered whether this man has been bothering anyone else.  Do you know him?  His name is Bill Gates.

Well, okay, I don’t know whether Bill is taking an obsessive interest in me personally.  But the marketing tactics of his company, Microsoft, are really getting on my nerves.

It’s their aggressive pushing of Windows 10.  Whenever I turn on my computer, a message will pop up saying, “Great news!  You can now update to Windows 10.  Here are our great new features...” and so on.  If I close the message it just pops up again 20 minutes later.  So if I then read the message and try to find a way to answer it with something like, “No, thank you”, or “Please don’t send me this message again”, or “If you keep harassing me, I’m going to call the police”, I can’t find such an option.  All I can select is either “Get Windows 10 now”, or “Get Windows 10 later”.  I thought that if you were offering something, you had to entice the other person, not just keep annoying them until they give in.  Imagine trying to attract a member of the opposite sex at work.  Would it be acceptable to keep asking them out again and again until they got so tired that they accepted your advances?  (In case anyone is having difficulty answering that one, the correct answer is “No, it would not be acceptable.)

Bill, if this is your seduction technique, then don’t be surprised if people look for other options.  At the moment I would rather smash my computer with a rock and move to a stone age village without internet access than give in and get Windows 10.  I have been known to overreact, however.

“But why wouldn’t you want Windows 10?” you might ask.  “It’s newer and so it must be better.”  Well, maybe.  But newer in my experience usually means more complicated and with more useless features designed to make me spend money.

For example, Windows Media Player was recently updated and Microsoft sent me a message to congratulate me on my good fortune.  The big change was a shop linking my media player to the internet so that I could buy songs directly from Microsoft.  I don’t want to buy songs directly from Microsoft, so I turned the on-line shop feature off.  When I did that, the media player stopped working correctly.  It crashes about 50 per cent of the time I try to use it now.  Honestly, it worked fine before.  I’m sure that newer is better for Microsoft.  I’m just not sure that it’s better for me.

Next week’s blog will be chiselled in stone.  Come to Nerima English and you can take a look.  Will you be coming round now, or coming round later? 

Vocabulary:

to harass – to subject to aggressive pressure or intimidation

not to take no for an answer – to refuse to acknowledge someone’s refusal of an offer

persistent – tending to continue despite opposition, refusal, difficulty etc.

to get on one’s nerves – to annoy or irritate

to pop up – especially of messages on a computer screen, to suddenly appear

to entice – to attract

seduction – the act of persuading someone to enter a romantic or sexual relationship

stone age – of a civilization or society, being at a stage where use of stone tools is common

to chisel – to make marks such as letters in rock, using hard tools

 

 

We’ve got you on file －お前は記録されている－

Is there anyone who could get through a long life in the modern world without committing a crime?  Even if a saint were to walk the Earth, would he make it from the cradle to the grave without once parking his car in a no-parking zone, or copying and pasting something off the internet without carefully checking its copyright status, or without renting a dvd and then forgetting to return it?

The trouble with writing down a set of laws is that while they look good on paper, it is impossible to predict all the random circumstances which might come together to prompt someone to break one of them.

In the Bible, perhaps the most famous Commandment, or law, is “Thou shalt not kill.”  In modern English, that would be “You must not kill.”  And yet the punishment for breaking this law in normal circumstances was to be executed.  So there must already be one exception to the law.  “Thou shalt not kill, unless you are the public executioner.”  And what about self-defence?  War?  Accidentally causing someone’s death through reckless behaviour like drink-driving?  It would be a tough bureaucracy which treated all of these circumstances exactly the same, and rigidly applied the letter of the law.

That’s why I couldn’t help but laugh at a recent story from America.  A man in North Carolina was driving his daughter to school when he was pulled over by the police.  They stopped him because one of his brake lights wasn’t working correctly.  When they asked his name, they ran a computer check on him and found that there was a warrant out for his arrest, which he hadn’t known about.  He had rented a VHS (the big tapes we used to watch movies before DVDs) in 2002 and had failed to return it.  The video rental store had in the meantime gone bankrupt (presumably not just because of this one lost tape).  So the criminal mastermind, Mr. James Meyers, was taken in handcuffs to the local court to face charges.

Mightn’t this be an example of a bureaucracy trying to rigidly apply the letter of the law, rather than applying common sense and taking account of the circumstances?  Mr. Meyers probably broke the Commandment “Thou shalt not steal”, but was it really in the public interest to put him in handcuffs?

Perhaps the most worrying aspect is the way a minor crime was kept on record and used against him 14 years later.  We live in the computer age now.  Every little crime you commit, from accidental copyright violation to unpaid parking tickets or unreturned library books can be kept on record and used against you.  Since even a saint would struggle to get through life without breaking the law in some circumstances, if they want to get you for something, I’m sure they’ve got something to get you with.  Let’s hope the authorities are always willing to show a little common sense and decency.

And promise you will never tell anyone about that book I borrowed from the boy scouts in about 1990 and never returned.

 

Vocabulary:

a cradle – a bed or resting place for a baby

to prompt – to cause or encourage

a Commandment – In the Bible, God gave 10 Commandments, or strict rules of behaviour

a bureaucracy – an organisation for dealing with laws, rules, paperwork etc.

rigidly – strictly; unbendingly

the letter of the law – the law exactly as it is written; a literal or strict interpretation of the law

a warrant – a document giving the police permission to arrest someone

a violation – of a law, rule etc., a case where it is broken or not correctly followed

 

 

A Spartan education versus cotton wool －スパルタ教育 v.s. 綿花の優しさ－

I was listening to a sports programme on the radio recently.  Some former professional players were discussing how differently young players are treated these days, compared to previous generations.

These ex-pros were complaining that modern youngsters rarely had a tough mentality.  They might be as skilful as former players, but tended to react badly to pressure.

Twenty years ago, managers would shout at the players when they were losing, and criticise them harshly when they were performing poorly.  Before they became successful members of the first team, they were expected to show their dedication and work-ethic by cleaning the boots of the older players.

According to these ex-pros, the modern young players are mollycoddled.  They aren’t exposed to harsh criticism, and have teams of experts looking after their diet, media relations, contract negotiations and so on.  It is like being wrapped in cotton wool, always warm and safe.  Then when the cotton wool eventually slips and, say, the team is on a bad losing run and is facing heavy criticism from the fans and media, the players aren’t able to handle the pressure.

The discussion made me think of the wild swings in Japanese educational policy, from wrapping the kids in cotton wool one day to Spartan education the next.

“Spartan education” is a term used in Japan to mean severe education, with the purpose of turning out tough kids.  One manifestation of this is the crazy lengths, or rather heights, schools often go to in sports festivals.  In these events, many schools have the children form extremely tall human pyramids.  Some primary schools form pyramids of nine tiers.  Some junior high-schools have the children form pyramids of 11 tiers.  That is as high as the third floor of a building, and students at the bottom are estimated to be supporting the weight of 4.2 children.  Clearly, this risks causing accidents.  I found an article from 2012 which said that in that year alone, there were 6,533 accidents in schools whilst trying to form human pyramids.  In the ten years leading to 2012, there were 20 serious accidents caused, leading to permanent injuries or disabilities.

The opposite of Spartan education is “Yutori kyoiku”, or easy-going education.  Following this policy, many schools in Japan tried to take pressure off students to the extent that they only had to learn that the mathematical constant pi was 3, rather than 3.14 (or to greater detail).  In many sports events, there are effectively no losers.  If there are eight students in a race, then they all win a medal at the end.  The person who finishes eighth is merely the slowest winner.  It is no wonder that when these kids graduate and start working, they burst into tears when they are criticised for doing something wrong.

No doubt the ideal is somewhere in between the two extremes.  Learning how to react to tough conditions and pressure is important, and there is nothing wrong with losing on occasion.  But if I were asked to climb an 11 tier pyramid, I think I might have a cold that day, or a conveniently twisted ankle.  “Sorry, coach.  Why don’t you climb up instead?”

 

Vocabulary:

a work-ethic – an understanding of the value of hard work; a hardworking attitude

to be mollycoddled – Especially of a child or youngster, to be over-protected from harsh realities or difficulties

cotton wool – a soft, white sheet of cotton, used in a variety of applications such as cleaning the face

to turn something out – to produce something

a manifestation - an embodiment; a physical example of something abstract or theoretical

No coffee please, I’m British – Thoughts on elegant and vulgar caffeine －イギリス人ですから、コーヒーは結構です。上品なカフェインと下品なカフェインについて。－

“If you feel a bit under the weather,

If you feel a little bit peeved,

Take Granny’s stand-by potion,

For any old cough or wheeze. 

It’s a cure for hepatitis,

It’s a cure for chronic insomnia,

It’s a cure for tonsilitis,

And for water on the knee.

Have a cuppa tea...”

From “Have a cuppa tea”, by the Kinks

I always write my blogs on a Thursday after meeting a friend in a local coffee shop.  She read out a pamphlet to me which had been left there, explaining the benefits of drinking coffee.  It got me thinking of the different cultures of coffee drinking and its great rival, tea drinking.

An English gentleman drinks tea.  Nobody seems to know quite how it is supposed to be prepared: some say that the milk is added after the boiled water, and others swear blind that the milk must go in first.  Some add sugar, or lemon.  Some take it black.  But few are in doubt that Britain is a land of tea bags and cuppas.

In the English speaking world, it is the Americans who dominate coffee.  Their Seattle based coffee empires sweep the world, avoiding local taxes and adding so much sugar, cream and chocolate to their coffee that you wonder if the people who drink it actually like the taste of coffee at all.

In Britain at least, coffee has an image problem.  It is not that we don’t drink coffee.  As I suggested above, our high streets are filled with chains of American coffee stores.  We probably drink, as a nation, about the same amount of coffee as we do tea.  It’s just that we don’t respect coffee in the same way.

Tea is drunk with ceremony.  The precise ceremony might differ from household to household and from person to person.  But in a crisis situation, a cup of tea will be a calming influence.  If important guests come round, the expensive china teacups will be brought out to show how important their visit is to you.  Tea drinking can be very elegant.

Who has expensive coffee mugs for special occasions?  Well, actually, my wife does.  But she’s Japanese and so doesn’t count.  In a crisis, who would make everyone a cup of coffee to calm them down?  Not many people, since coffee is a strong stimulant.  It will simply increase everyone’s nervous energy and tension.  Tea, of course, also contains caffeine, but much less than in a typical cup of coffee.

Perhaps it was this stimulating effect of coffee which made the British king try to ban coffee houses in 1675.  Coffee houses were vibrant places where social classes mixed, people discussed politics and exchanged rumours.  It might well be politically dangerous to get people angry at the government, and then fill them with a restless, caffeine-fuelled energy buzz.  You could call coffee the more vulgar of the two drinks.  It’s hard to be so angry when drinking from a dainty little china cup.

And so both coffee and tea have their place.  My blogs are often angry complaints about what’s going wrong in the world, or my life.  Coffee is the perfect drink for a blog writer.  But there’s a refreshing cup of tea brewing to calm me down when I finish.  I’ll have mine black please: no milk and no sugar.

 

Vocabulary:

under the weather – a British slang expression, meaning feeling unwell

peeved – angry or upset

a wheeze – the condition of having difficulty breathing, when one makes a noise breathing in and out

chronic – about a problem or illness, persistent or recurring

insomnia – the medical term for being unable to sleep

to swear blind - a slang expression, meaning to absolutely insist that something is true or correct

a cuppa – British slang for a cup of tea

a stimulant – a drug, drink etc. which makes people feel more energetic

vulgar – rough, inelegant, unsophisticated etc.

dainty – delicate; small and fragile