I ride a lot of trains in Japan but am fortunate enough to not have to ride on the crowded, standing room only trains very often, nor for very long when I do. I suppose that is one advantage of commuting longer distances. In Kyoto, I live on a northern fringe of town serviced by a separate line that I ride for about 9 minutes (5 stops) to get to one of the larger arterial lines that takes me in Osaka. Many lines have a few different trains, from the local that stops at every stop on up to the tokkyuu (special express) which makes very few stops. Tokkyuu are much faster because they make fewer stops, but are only convenient if you live near one of those stops. And if you can catch the train at the terminal, as I do, you are usually able to sit down in one of the forward facing pairs of seats that only the longer distance, faster express trains have. The commuter trains have inward facing bench seats that run along the sides of the car, opening more space for the standing customers.
Even though the tokkyuu has forward facing seats, none of them are assigned; it's all first come, first served. There is a special section dedicated for the elderly, infirm, and pregnant that manners dictate should be relinquished if needed by such individuals, but overall, its just a matter of getting an open seat. There is no entitlement or ownership to any of the seats on the train.
As a result of this equality, anyone can sit in any open seat. Yet everyone lays claim to and respects others' claims to a pseudo-ownership of sorts. In most cases, (middle age men are horribly rude by any standard) when a person comes to sit in an open seat next to an inhabited seat, they give a slight nod or mumble "excuse me" as they sit in the open space. Sometimes they have to essentially beg to be seated if the person who was already seated has filled the empty seat with a coat or bag. It is as if people feel that placing a bag there somehow grants them exclusive use of the seat that someone else could sit in.
But even more surprising is that sometimes this exertion of ownership is honored by the person who would sit down. Many times I've seen someone standing when there are open seats filled with a briefcase or something. Often the owner of the briefcase will realize this and move their object at which time the standing person will take the seat, always with a significant show of gratitude expressed by a deep head bow. Again, it is as if the person who was standing felt that they didn't have the right to ask the person to move their bag so they could sit down. I find that rather amazing, and not entirely explicable by the Japanese concern for others that is so often misunderstood as a predilection for politeness and manners. Correction, it is explainable by the aspect of Japanese cultural psychology, but it not part of the standard regimen. It's an almost pathological expression of it (but I suppose others may see it as a supremely virtuous expression of it).
But this whole dynamic of ownership and entitlement changes on trains that have assigned seating. The trains I have described above all cost the same regardless of whether you take the slow local or the faster tokkyuu. Some lines also offer premium tickets for faster, more comfortable trains that include reclining seats, coat hangers, restrooms, and deluxe and smoking cars. The shinkansen bullet train is the most striking and well known example of this class of train. The trains have an added super express fee for these amenities.
I've been riding one of these super expresses since we've moved in with my in-laws for the last 6 months and noticed differences in how people relate to each other with respect to personal space and use of the seats. Because the super express fee gets you an assigned seat, when you go to sit down, you have entitlement to the open seat next to someone who is already sitting down. Many people still offer a gesture of politeness when sitting, but the sense of "I'm sorry for impinging on the space near you" is drastically reduced. Sometimes there is even a veneer of contempt for using the "owned" space of the new arrival.
Physically there is no difference between sitting next to someone on a reserved seating train and a open seating one, but people behave differently. Maybe I'm getting impressed by simple things, but I found it intriguing that the rental of the space in a reserved car would impart attitudes that diverge from the public commons example of the open seating car. I'm not criticizing or mocking the behavior, as I do it too, but it seemed like another nice example of the ways that people in common social space create, subscribe to, and sustain collective definitions and values.
Lastly, there is one other element of the perception of ownership of an open seat that applies to both reserved and non-reserved cars. It is nice when no one sits next to you because you have a place to put your bag or drink or whatever. When my wife and I travel together, we sit together (naturally). If the seats across the isle is entirely empty, I'll often use them, but if the window seat (furthest from me) is occupied, I cannot bring myself to use the open seat. Yet why not? The person sitting in the window seat doesn't have any exclusive claim to use it, yet I can't bring myself to set my bag there. It feels like I'm invading their space. Indeed, I would be invading their space, but that space wouldn't be theirs in any definable way (like if I were to put something on their lap, for example) since I could easily sit in the empty space if needed. But I couldn't use that space for utilitarian purposes.
Odd creatures, humans are, with there psychological methods that not only create these boundaries but then ascribe such powerful value to them that they cannot bring themselves to violate them without discomfort.
Come, invade our personal space and post a comment.
A rather detailed yet thoroughly readable description of the last moments of the Columbia has been posted. An excellent read. It is somber and absorbing and really puts you in the astronauts' position as their ship disintegrates beneath them. It had almost as much an impact on me, perhaps more even, than watching them fall to Earth.
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Japan is so quaint sometimes I could pee. For the most part, it's very similar to life in any developed country (well, I admit I haven't lived in any except for the U.S. and Japan, but still). But there are occasions when its traditional values leap out, often highlighting an innocence and naivete long lost in much of the rest of the developed world.
Last week was the annual seijinshiki, the coming of age ceremony that signifies the 20 year-old's passage into adulthood. They are now legal to drink and smoke, can vote, and have the full power of the law pressed upon them for crimes. They are expected to be able to carry adult responsibilities and make adult decisions, yadda yadda yadda.
But this is a big deal, seriously. The Japanese are big on ceremony and ritual, you see. A number of my students came up to me after class to show me pictures of them dressed up in their extremely fancy kimono with fur stoles, very pretty. These ceremonies are highly anticipated and thoroughly enjoyed.
But there can be trouble in paradise.
There were trouble makers afoot, raising a ruckus and attracting all sorts of media attention. The news covered these hooligans for almost a week. Mostly males, they were hooting and hollering during the official speeches, walking up and down the aisles (dressed in beautiful formal attire), starting fights (mostly yelling matches using the most vulgar grammar and guttural tones), even jumping on stage to tug at and tear down some of the posters hung in their honor. Some were drunk (20 is the legal drinking and smoking age in Japan, but with vending machines all over, it's widely violated) and there were even women gathered with the smokers outside! THE HORROR!!
It was reassuring to see such a relatively minor issue take such precedence in the news. Even though I'm trivializing it, these were truly disruptive assholes out to ruin everyone's good time in some perverse draw for attention. It's common among bousouzoku gangs, just being annoying by modifying their cars with the loudest possible muffle and outrageous lights and fins (I should get pics) or riding around slowly on a motorcycle just gunning the engine to annoy. In a nation that prides itself on manners and consideration for others, being publicly inconsiderate is the best way to rebel and flaunt the rules.
There was another big scandal that bears mentioning in the same vein. There is an annual race at a particular shrine in Tokyo that is run by many people, perhaps semi-comparable to the Bulls of Pamplona. People line up behind these big doors which are swung open at the specific hour and they race for luck. Older people run along for the thrill of it, but the people who line up really early are in it to win. You get a special prize and are always on the news and it's a nice feel-good moment.
Last year, one guy was in the lead but he slipped and fell. This year, he collaborated with some friends and lined up early enough to be the first behind the door. Then, when the door was opened, he took off but his friends linked arms and held the rest of the crowd back. Their motivation wasn't to cheat out others as much as to give the guy what they felt was his due from the previous year.
Only problem was that this is a popular even, always covered by the news, and it was immediately obvious what had happened. It was blatant that the compatriots had obstructed everyone else, and the guy who won ended up shamed and apologetic. He returned his prize and apologized for the incident, but this too was big news for a few days.
So while I at times fret because I'm so out of the loop vis a vis happenings in the U.S., at other times I'm kind of glad to be. Japan is not without its problems and shortcomings, but it does retain particular elements of life and society that are very nice to have about, and I'm sure that I would miss them if I ever move away.
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It is probably old news to those living in the U.S., but I just learned that it isn't necessarily verboten to say "fuck" on broadcast tv these days. I guess it started with Bono accepting an award and saying something like "this is really fucking great," a comment the FCC ruled doesn't have the sexual connotation that For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge is famously banned for.
Of course, the close minded conservative (and coincidentally religious) crowd is up in arms, chicken littling about a future where fuck is in every song and talk show on the radio and on every sitcom and drama on broadcast tv. While this is hyperbole, if it gets them to shut off the tv and quit listening to the radio, I'm happier.
This is a great decision by the FCC though. It isn't because I want to hear people say "fuck" all the time (although it does allow for more realistic dialog). It's important to recognize that language isn't static and evolves, changes, fluctuates and morphs. If there is a word you don't like, redefine its usage. We've seen this with how gays adopted "fag" and blacks use "nigger". Even the word gay itself initially wasn't used in reference to homosexuality.
"Fuck" is a such a versatile word, a characteristic of it I didn't realize in its full extent until we were trying to help some Japanese students understand Pulp Fiction. "Fuck" is used in pretty much every way possible in that movie which made it harrowing to explain and understand. So many curses have become commodities as of late. "Damn," "piss," and "tits" aren't quite as vulgar as they once were (especially if you hang around Aussies, Limeys and Kiwis, where "taking the piss out of someone" is second nature). So while it may overstimulate our sensitivities at first, this move has the potential to gut "fuck" of the power derived entirely from its extreme taboo status.
This in turn highlights another phenomenon of cultural life. It is a natural reaction to try to impose restrictions on taboo and undesirable elements, but that often enhances the power and allure of the banned activity. The best solution at times is the counterintuitive one of ignoring and refusing to aid the strength of the taboo by validating it. This is also kind of the issue behind the Open Source Software movement. It seems counterintuitive that making software free to download and alter would be beneficial to the software or business, but we've seen how that isn't the case. It works with information (making information more freely available is better than locking it all up to prevent "bad" uses) and computer security (keeping vulnerabilities secret makes networks less secure than publishing them) and a host of other areas.
Protesting the FCC ruling that recognizes the adjectival form of "fuck" as acceptable only draws attention to the word and ends up with more people thinking and talking about it, which is just the opposite of what you are fighting for. Best to recognize that "fuck" is a widely used and fundamental element of our speech and just preach around it.
Good fucking luck.
It's so obvious I'm sure its been done, but why not file a patent on the "process of using human rational and irrational thought, including but not limited to spontaneous notions and developed theories, to create, improve, devise, or otherwise develop goods and services"? If Amazon can patent "one-click" shopping, why can't I patent the use of thought in the process of creation? Prior art isn't a valid defense since people don't actually plan on implementing thought, they just do it.
Having this patent wouldn't grant me ownership of all the works derived from the process of using thought, but it would tender a pretty penny in licensing fees, even at minimal (and mandatory!) levels. w00t!
Got comments?
I guess it's FINALLY time for VoIP to take off. For those not in the know, Voice over IP is simply using the network that delivers our email and web pages to carry phone calls. The idea is that once the phone call data (your voice) gets translated into internet-speak, it travels across the Internet for the same price as your email, namely free. There are costs associated with the translation from phone call to internet-speak and then back again on the other end, but it makes phone calling extremely cheap, especially internationally.
It's been possible for a while now to take advantage of this possibility with a few different companies (there are links at the bottom of the Wired.com article linked earlier here), but I've heard the lag times and sound quality weren't good enough to make it an first choice option for many beyond the brokest college students. But the tech has matured and the street claims that up to or over 10% of all phone calls are carried over the Internet now and most people don't even realize it. As this becomes more popular, phone rates should plummet even more. Imagine getting 1¢/ minute all day, every day for your long distance charges. I don't know if it will fall that low for international calls, but anything better than the current 27¥/ minute I pay now will be nice.
Before I go on to explain my technological idea that really is the basis of this post, I have to wonder if VoIP is going to affect surveillance technology. It seems on the one hand that putting phone calls over the net can make it easier to eavesdrop (all your email is totally naked, essentially being sent as postcards that every mailman/ISP can read along the way, but of course VoIP calls are encrypted) because the authorities don't have to tap into privately owned phone lines. Then again, the path that the packets take from source to destination aren't predictable, so unless the VoIP call is intercepted at the entry or exit ISP, it might be harder to capture. I don't know enough about the technology behind VoIP to know if this structure of delivering phone calls is more or less likely to exploitation. If it does turn out to be easier to listen in on calls, I'm less concerned about being listened to as I am about the authorities getting overloaded with mostly benign data. It dilutes their power to pay attention if it is too easy to gather info.
But the real issue is that internet packets can be copied and archived as it passes from server to server. This means that old phone calls can be archived and mined well after the fact. So even if the authorities aren't tapping phone calls as they happen, if they want/ need to, they may be able to go into the servers and pull up data on phone calls made days, weeks, months ago. I don't know if I like that at all. Of course, I am fairly uneducated about this tech and maybe regular phone calls are archived like this, or maybe it isn't possible with VoIP, but it seems logical to me. We all saw what happened to Microsoft.
(Sidenote: I am consistently amazed at my inability to get to my intended point when I write these entries. I end up taking a full featured run-up to what I want to say that usually ends up being fully featured enough and far enough off course of the initial idea that it ends up being its own post and the original idea falls by the wayside. Here I go, finally getting to my point though....)
One of the problems with VoIP is that it does have to use phone lines at least part of the way, unless you want to require both parties to use their computers with headset microphones. But people want to use their phones to make phone calls, right?
I use DSL for my internet access which means that my internet and my phone calls travel over the same line. The DSL just uses a higher frequency range (or some other technical element), but the phone line comes out of the wall and runs into a splitter that sends a line to my router and a line to my phone. So I started thinking about why that splitter couldn't be used to transfer phone call data into a format that could be sent out over the DSL bandwidth?
THEN I started really thinking. I have a modem on my computer that hasn't been used and never will be as I prefer to pay the premium price for premium speed. Why can't this modem port be used? Run a line from the phone to the modem port for the voice data to run into and then use the computer to translate and send the data out over the cable or DSL line. I don't know what kind of bandwidth a phone call needs, but audio data is easy to compress rather substantially, so the bandwidth at the modem shouldn't be a problem. Even it if it is, it shouldn't be too tough to build a better modem for cheap (and whatever happen to v.92?).
Anyway, that was my idea. We all have phone ports and ethernet ports, why can't we run the phone into the computer and let it do the heavy work of translating the phone call into VoIP? I'm sure there are good reasons why this isn't possible or hasn't been thought of, but I thought it was a good one.
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2003 was a good year for me, the best I've have since I was dealing LSD in college. I finished my dissertation, got a permanent teaching job, and had a daughter. It's hard to imagine having another year this substantial actually. Maybe another kid in the near future, but the milestones of a first child, finally finishing school and getting a teaching job with an office are pretty hard to top. I hope that everyone else had good years as well, and thinking off the top of my head, I think most of my close friends (those from Idaho as well as those I've met online) all did pretty well too. May we all continue making lives as good as we've done so far.
The rest of the world didn't seem to have such a great year, nominally due to the "leadership" of the current U.S. administration. I'm too tired to mount a worthy attack on the failure of the President and his advisors (well, they didn't fail to convincingly lie to the American taxpayer to wage an illegal war against a sovereign state and funnel billions of tax dollars away from domestic programs and into the coffers of the well-connected business of the great USA, but I digress), but hopefully we can all agree that a brighter future wouldn't have a lot of the milestones we saw this year. I'm working real hard to develop my realism (good pun, eh?) as a productive expression of my optimism and idealism and as a counter to my pessimism, but at the change of the Gregorian calendar, I'll indulge in a bit of pure hippism and hope for peace, love, and lots of free drugs in the next year.
To get things off on the right foot, I'll close out this post with a nod to Bartleby.com, an incredible site full of reference books and other really useful information, if you're into that sort of thing. Or maybe you're more the Gutenberg type? Lastly, but in now way the least, I've recently discovered that Rotten isn't just the soft, white underbelly of the internet, but it also has a a pretty durned cool library that is worth a gander if you're bored.
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