Craven Impulses

The Yamanote line isn’t very full this morning, as we pull into Gotanda.  It’s 11:00AM.  Good Japanese boys and girls are all at their offices, behind their desks by this time.  Gotanda Station has yielded no one new for this car.  No one has left.   It’s overcast here in town.  Certainly a bit colder than it was yesterday. I’m heading now to a big trade show. They certainly try harder in Japan, than most places to make these shows bright and shiny.

The train is full of foreigners.  These are the foreigners I can discern at a quick glance; people of European descent mostly.  A group of four just boarded the train and given that they went straight to the map, I listened and eventually gave up and made up my mind that they were Chinese.  Later I overheard them speaking California English.  Chinese is certainly all over the air though, here in town.  I heard it behind me in line yesterday at the coffee shop, then again at a street corner, waiting to cross.   I must resist the craven impulse to interject myself into these people’s otherwise, private Chinese conversations.  

The ads on the Yamanote line, are really well done.  There is a TV screen with a running loop of smarter-than-thou ads. There is an ad for Yahoo Japan that has a guy with glasses smiling in the center and two enormous hands physically dangling from the cardboard.   Screens, three dimensional ads; these all wouldn’t last long in the F train of my memory.  All the ads are targeted at well-heeled consumers with beaucoup disposable income.  No one is advertising for trade schools or corn-removal or legal assistance, the default in the New York City subways. 

My phone keeps humming in my pocket.  These are short staccato hums.  More craven impulses.  I can politely ignore them for a bit.  Text messages, we chat messages, skype messages, these are easier to ignore in the short term. I would drool obediently though if the prolonged buzzer buzzed.  This would indicate a phone call and before I considered whether or not I intended to answer, I'd have the device out and in my face.  Who's that?  

We have arrived an Yurakcho Station and the Tokyo Forum.  Six years ago I had office here, which I had to visit every time I came to town.  I haven't been back since then.  In this neighborhood, there are countless little restaurants and pathways down in the spaces below the train tracks.