Japanese Salaryman Life pt.2

Continuing from Part 1.

Every morning I usually woke up at 5:50 a.m.

After letting some sun light into the room, I would rush to the bathroom to take my daily morning shower.

Scrubby me here and there.

After some simple breakfast, I would put on my suit with matching neckties and long sleeved shirts, and get ready to get out of the apartment at exactly 6:50 a.m.; so that I could join my co-workers to go to work together.

Yes, I went to work with my co-workers every morning! What team spirit eh?

Anyways, our means of transportation to go to work is the famous Japanese densha system. Famous for what?

Morning rush hours and suicides of course!

*Densha (電車) means (public) train.

In all seriousness though, work-commuting by train in big Japanese cities (in my situation, Yokohama) is pure pain, and such an energy drowning experience.

There was just too many people during the morning rush hours, and not enough trains to accommodate them; causing extreme over-crowding especially from 7:30am to 9:00am.

In Malaysia, if a train was crowded with people, you would simply wait for the next train and board the less crowded one.

In Japan, even if you wait for the next train, the situation would be the same; the next train is also going to be extremely over-crowded, and you don’t want to be late to work, so you just board the train, NO MATTER how crowded it is.

Some of you might think, well a crowded train might not be so bad?

I want you to watch the video below, and you’d understand why I hate the morning rush hours that I have to endure each day going to work.

Basically this is the kind of trains that I have to board every morning, minus 10 people, maybe.

I got squished, pushed, sandwiched, pressed, feet stomped on and some more.

What makes it worse is that the majority of the Japanese salaryman here don’t believe in morning showers. Damn some of them do stink!

And I have to endure all if this for an hour every morning; what a great way to start work!

It does not happen very often, but sometimes there are people who choose to use the train, not to go to work, but to kill themselves; and we morning train commuters hate them to the bones!

Not only they delayed and decrease the available train, they also made such a mess on the platform. The number of passengers would drastically increase two, three folds when this happens, and it caused such human-traffic congestion inside the station.

So please to those who wants to kill themselves, please do it without causing other people trouble, especially when we all are rushing to go to work!

Kill yourselves in a hole that you dug by yourself in the comfort of your own lawn, please! O wait a minute, not many people in Japan has lawns!

Anyways, with so much human density in such a small space, it was inevitable that this would happen: CHIKAN.

*chikan (痴漢) means molestation, in this context, molesting female commuters in the densha. Normally this would consist of an old Japanese salaryman, rubbing his penis against the lady in front of him, or using his hands to grab and have a ‘feel’ on any available female’s ass inside the crowded train.

I pity the Japanese girls that they’re living in a land full of perverts.

I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and in such crowded situation, it would be hard to know whose hand it is that was grabbing that OL’s ass.

*OL = short for ‘office lady’.

What I don’t understand is that most of the victims stayed silent and still, their faces facing down, like nothing wrong happened. Maybe they’re just too ashamed to make a scene and report it to the police.

Maybe they thought, if I just endure this, I might get to work on time!

But because such chikan perverts exists, I’m always cautious in making sure that I won’t be mistakenly accused of doing such acts.

Now, that’s another whole story…

Enough with train suicides and train molesters… all of this makes me dull.

Anyways, I should be glad that starting from tomorrow, I won’t be using the train anymore because I got sent to further my training in Sagamihara, which is just a 20 minutes walk from my apartment!

Although this only lasts for 3 weeks, I’m looking forward to a new scenery; no more crowdedness, no more suicidal nuisances, no more salaryman perverts grabbing high school girl’s asses.

Three weeks of awesomeness!

[note: the extreme 'crowdiness' situation only applies during morning rush hours. using the train to get home from work in the evening is often quite relaxed; sometimes i could even sit down on the seats!]