Tokyo Rush Hour

We set off from Minnowa one morning, in the North-East of Tokyo, where our hostel was. For once, we had a very valid mission in mind; I was carrying the coat of an Irish boy we had met on the airplane and been out all night with two days before.

The three of us arranged to meet to watch a football game in the Foot Nik bar in Ebisu on the Hibiya Line, then, after a pretty good session of Liverpool thrashing Manchester United, we got stranded in Roppongi when the last train stopped and decided to go no further. Oh crap, an all-nighter - the only solution.

After going to Gas Panic (a popular hip-hop bar loved by young Japanese and foreigners) we ended up in an Irish bar where said friend decided to try and get the bar staff to buy him drinks based upon the premise that they were all from the Emerald Isle.

Needless to say, he annoyed a fair few of them before falling asleep on a toilet seat and being asked to leave. There we were sitting at our table, fruitlessly waiting for him to return, his coat - complete with a camera in the pocket - lying folded next to us.

So, before we embarked on our day of visiting the Ghibli Museum (a film studio dedicated to the animation master himself, Hayaho Miyazaki), we thought it was only right to deliver this guy's coat to his hostel in Inaricho.

However, we'd started early. I had been to Tokyo several times before and thought I'd seen rush hour on several occasions. How wrong I was.

Standing on the Metro platform of the (by Tokto standards, quiet) area of Minnowa at just before 8am, we noticed at every door point a man was standing in full uniform waiting for the tube to pull in.

When it did, it was like nothing I'd seen before on the Tokyo subway, or elsewhere. Each carriage was jammed to the brim with black and white figures pressed up against the glass and one another, faces vacant and completely natural.

The doors opened and those at the gap held onto the ceiling and door frame to avoid spilling out onto the platform. Yet, a group of people standing next to us, dressed in their work suits and polished shoes, walked into the mass grave of vertical people and still managed to get on, courtesy of the uniformed man, whose job it is to simply push, squash, compress and close train the doors on the dedicated workers of Tokyo.

We looked at one another.

"How are we.."

"I don't know."

"Shall we wait for the next one?"

"It'll just be the same."

He was right, it was the same, completely, as was the next one and the next one and the next one. But still people arrived at the platform and still they were jammed onto the impatiently waiting tubes by the pusher. He eyed us occasioanlly, no doubt amused by our timidity, though his face never betrayed this.

I would have been happy to take a seat on the platform and watch, maybe let an hour go by, while white gloves squashed more and more people into the sardine tin. They were so frequent - maybe ever two minutes, that the process became hypnotic, interesting, an ever-repeated feat of will, endurance and even grace.

However, I looked down at the thick black wooly coat in my hand, which was designed to keep out the winds of the Irish Sea and probably never expecting to see the Tokyo rush hour. We had to get on a train, it was that simple.

The best way to do this, it was decided, would be for me to use the woman's only carriage and him an average one, to increase our chances of being squashed into one of the spaceless carriages.

We approached our respective platform spaces. The white gloved man glanced at me.

The scream of metal pierced the air, a warm wind hit my face and the metal cylinder zoomed past before slowing to a stop, the black and white blurs gradually assuming their people-shaped forms.

A door opened in front of me to reveal a magnificent crowd of suited women pressed into a tiny space - some of them schoolgirls, hanging onto the overhead monkey rings.

Not an inch of space to be had - women spilled out onto the platform. I stepped back - it wasn't going to happen. But then, a glance down the platform confirmed that he had managed to get on the train and I hadn't. We hadn't talked about what might happen if one of us missed it this time around.

I gathered my nerves as the buzzer sounded and put my foot into the crowd of shoes. The white gloved man came up from behind and said "please", before pushing me into the vertical bed of women. I took a deep breath. The doors attempted to close, but the thick wooly coat got stuck in between them. My pusher's white gloves quickly squashed it into the diminishing the gap, before he stepped back from the platform and signalled along the line with a trusty orange stick.

There was little or no air in the carriage, but it felt comfortable, like being in a sleeping bag standing up. The height of summer, I'm sure, would be a different story, but in mid-March, the balance may have been just right.

I looked around (not up, for once) at other women's faces. They were incredibly reserved, steely and nonchalant, as the Japaneses' public faces are in most situations. A couple of friends chatted and giggled. maybe talking about an idiotic work colleague or a meeting they had that day. The tube stopped again and opened to a platform of patiently queuing suited people.

Holding onto the top edge of the door to stop myself falling out, I knew for a fact that nobody else could be squeezed on. Wrong! At least three women approached, the infinite queue behind them stopping as it became clear that, finally, there was no room left.

The air in my lungs emptied, again, again and again with each new passeneger. The last woman to brave the carriage approached the doors backwards, leaned into the crowd and pushed against the doorframe with all her might. Less air again, my blood felt like it was struggling around my body, like a marathon runner in their final mile.

Again, the great metal dragon lurched onwards through its underground caves. Our stop aproached -only two from Minnowa, but an achievement to an unfamiliar. When the doors opened, it seemed an impossibility to cut my way through the thick wall of bodies to get out. But somehow, these expert commuters around me forged the space quite effortlessly to allow others off train.

I burst from the shiny womb onto the platform to darting black jackets from every direction, breathing in the vacant air gratefully. To my right, he had also made it out of his carriage, busting out triumphantly like a zombie from a coffin.

We avoided the speeding commuters, each with their own essential missions, to reach one another. He held my hand and we ran up the concrete stairs to the sprawling zig-zagged corridors of bustling Ueno station. We laughed and reeled and enjoyed the adrenalin, propping ouselves up against a wall to recover. Rollercoasters, bungee jumps, parachutes, sex, drugs and drink all play second fiddle to a go on the Tokyo rush hour ride.

I take my hat off to Tokyo commuters - they do what Westerners do - face packed transport, long hours and hard work every day - under ten times more pressure. They do it all with relentless determination and much less moaning, rudeness and disrespect for their surroundings than we.















I was in awe.