On the Friday morning, we went to immigration with Akagi-san to get some papers taken care of. I now have a document which has about 8 long words in the title: “gaikokujintourokugempyoukisaishoumeisho“, in the end just an “alien registration form”. On the way there we got to experience some Tokyo subway rushhour. You know the pictures you always see with the insane seas of people constantly trying to get into subway trains? Yea, they really weren’t lying. If anything, they’re underestimating the situation. First of all, unlike elevators or TTC subway cars the subway doors dont open if there is something stuck in it - they just try to close harder. Moreover, there are stations that employ people, called “pushers”, to stuff people into trains and ensure that the doors close.
We got to experience getting “pushed” into a train on our second day in Tokyo - fun. Breathing just got harder. During rush hour, they have “women only” cars to make women more comfortable that the people that are being pressed into them are also female, and to alleviate the apparent groping problem they had in Tokyo. Aside from all those crazy thing i’ve just said, the Tokyo subway system is pretty genius. It has 8 different lines, every one of which is probably longer than the Kipling-Bloor in Toronto.
The JR trains (read: Tokyo GO Trains) are alot more tightly interwound into the subway system with alot of stops allowing interchanges. Furthermore, some subway lines just turn into JR trains once they leave the central city.
The trains themselves are alot more high-tech than the TTC ones. Actually some of the features that TTC was proposing for the 2009 “brand new amazing subway trains” are seen on some of the older models of the trains here. For example, take the fact that every train here, has open connections between all the cars - you can just walk through the entire train without having to open many doors. Many trains have lcd displays showing the all of the upcoming stops, and estimates on how long it will take to get there. The older models just have led-displays on the inside to display the next stop, kinda like the ones on the front of most buses. Finally, the automated ticket system that confused us on the first day, became alot more comprehendable. You pay based on distance. If you dont know how far you’re going, you pay minimum fare, and when you try to exit, the turnstyles close and yell at you saying “HEY, YOU OWE ME XXX yen” in a gentle womanly voice that says many words of kindness. Based on how much i wrote about the subway, you can see i was pretty excited about it. This, however was not the end of my day..
After the subway adventures we headed off to the office to meet some of our co-workers. This meeting went rather awekward as when someone tried to introduce us, all the Japanese employees kinda gathered in a circle and blurted out their lengthy name follwed by a series of head-nods. I personally remembered one name out of 15 or so. Then we had a short briefing about our jobs, but i’ll talk about that in a later posting. This all ended quickly and one of the two bosses, Nara-san, took us out for sushi in a relatively fancy restaurant. It was a traditional style restaurant, and we had to take off our shoes and put them into little cubby-holes before we got to sit down. The sushi tasted great, and we were offered plenty of beer and sake. Who could refuse? After all, the bill wasn’t our to pick up. Nara-san had to leave, but he gave money to Aaron to take us out for the rest of the night. We found some oddly-private kareoke joint, and had a good time. I sang some classics like the Immigrant Song and Hotel California. Then for some reason i threw in GnR’s “Welcome to the Jungle”. While singing, i realized that this is perhaps not the song for an enviroment with people that i will be working with, but it was too late to stop. If you’re curious as to why, check out the lyrics to the song. All in all, i had a really fun first day in Tokyo.