Lee Neale writing as Tijuana B. Spleenfiend
The attention to safety and order in Japan used to bug me. Automated warnings barking at your every step. Car park attendants, door ushers and train packers, showing you or shoving you every which way. Really? They pay people to do that, I used to think. No wonder the unemployment is so low. But I now realize, that without them, life in Japan would seriously suck.
At first, I couldn’t understand how 230 million people could live standing on each others toes, without wanting to ring each others necks. But I get now. The daily commute, which once seemed like a pressure-cooked moshpit, packed with sleepy, lurching salary men and women, now makes me chuckle like I’m watching a party game of: “How many stoned pacifists can you cram into a mini-minor car.”
In my imagination, emergency loudspeakers once seemed to drone orders at me, like Orwell’s Big Brother: “Forks and left-handed opening books are now banned. Surrender them at once, and you will be spared.” But as my Japanese language improved, I realized it was nothing so dark, mostly just lost little old ladies or children, quake warnings, and the odd avian flu reminder.
Other warnings that once annoyed me have become handy. They wake me when I’m asleep and my train-stop is approaching. If the Japanese and translated English announcement fails to rouse me, then a brain-busting blast of psychotically cheerful departure muzak, is sure to explode me up and out of the train, before my eyes are even open. A skill that salary men are stunned to find, is not exclusive to native Japanese.
Like Dr Heywood Floyd, from Stanley Kubrick’s, 2001 Space Odyssey, I was once uneasy about talking electronic devices. In the movie, the good doctor deactivated the faulty Hal 2000 on board ship computer, “just to be sure.”So I did the same to my talking toilet. But one bored, sake-drenched night, I put the batteries back in, and dared that talking potty to rate my contributions. Big mistake. Because it later took revenge, by convincing Sadie Chan the talking bath, to override her temperature safety protocols and burn my arse raw, during my next bath.
While I can reprogram my toilet, so that it does nothing but play my favorite punk and metal tunes, darned if I can convince the station master at my home station, to change the departure theme song to a muzak version of Metallica’s Enter Sandman. But I‘ll keep trying.
