In the UK if you are late for work and blame it on the train your boss will probably have a go at you for not taking the possibility of a late train into account. In Japan things are done differently, if you say you are late because of a train, your boss simply won’t believe you. That is because trains are so incredibly prompt here. Back in the day I used to use teletext as a guide to set my watch by, now I use the trains. If a train is due at 10:23, you will see doors opening in front of you at 10:23 exactly.

Tokyo and Yokohama’s train systems are stretched enough as it is though, when a train is late the overcrowding can be unbelievable. After being forced to play sardines for however long it takes to get to your destination, the last thing you want is an angry boss. To prove to them that you didn’t just oversleep the train companies have come up with an ingenious solution, the Chien Shoumeisho.

Chien Shoumeisho literally means delay proof document and is a little slip of paper that has a few holes punched in the sides. They are given out by the station attendants as you leave the ticket barriers. The message in the centre of the slip is from the stationmaster and basically says “Yep, really, the train was late”. Down the sides the attendant marks quite how late the train was by punching a hole in the correct box. The boxes run in 5 minute intervals and go from top right to bottom left. Across the bottom the attendant can mark the date.

As you can see from the picture above, my train was late by 60 minutes on the 17th. Oddly this resulted in me being only 45 minutes late for work, I must have walked super fast from the station. It strikes me that these things would be really easy to forge, seeing as nobody signs them. All you would need to do would be to photocopy a used one. I wonder if anyone has ever done such a thing, I’m sure there is a hit crime caper movie in this idea at least.

I’m fairly late in the day with this but back in the Spring huge earthquakes were not the only thing to attract Japanese people and the news’ attention. On 1st April Ueno Zoo reopened and for the first time made it’s panda enclosure open to the public.

The pandas had arrived from China on 21st February meaning that they not only got here just in time for the Tohoku earthquake but as they had previously lived in the China Giant Panda Protection and Research Centre in Sichuan, they also experienced the 2008 quake which happened there.

These two quake veterans, named Li Li and Shin Shin, where thought to have been spooked by the quake but are happy as Larry now. Ueno Zoo did not have any pandas in it’s park for a period of 3 years before these new arrivals and when I visited the park back in June 2008, I was greeted with an unfortunate sign explaining the situation.

Picture the scene, I arrived at the zoo, paid my way, went through the ticket gate and entered a narrow tunnel which lead to the park. The tunnel was filled with lovely pictures of pandas frolicking and making sweet faces while eating their bamboo, I was just about to experience cuteness overload when I spied the sign. It contained Japanese text which I couldn’t read at all at the time, under that was what I assume to be the English translation, which read:

“There are no pandas in the park, they are dead”

That was an instant downer, after all those cute pictures I could almost have cried and it really highlighted to me the importance of having a native speaker of that language to advise you when you translate something. Technically there was nothing wrong with the translation but it was just so blunt about the death of the previous panda tenants that it became odd.

With that in mind, lots of posters started popping up around Tokyo advertising the new pandas so I thought I would have a go translating one for myself before someone from the park does it and makes me cry again. This poster is by JR and photographed by Jesse at Jesse-san in Japan.

行こうよ！
Ikou yo!
Lets Go!

列車で上野へ
Ressha de Ueno e
By train to Ueno

リーリーとシンシンが待ってるよ！
rii rii to shin shin ga matteru yo!
Li Li and Shin Shin are waiting.

This poster is fairly simple Japanese, the only issue I have is with the よ (yo) at the end of two of the sentences. よ, when used by itself at the end of a sentence is used to emphasise things. It has a light friendly tone and one common use is to give information that you think is new to the listener (especially when you think the listener needs that information).

In English we don’t have an equivalent particle so you have to get a bit creative when translating. This is certainly the case with the last sentence, it’s letting you know Li Li and Shin Shin are there so I decided to remove the exclamation mark, I think it makes this sentence seem a bit manic in English. I didn’t replace the mark with anything else though, perhaps I should have.

Sometimes よ just shows the speaker asserting themselves more strongly than if they made the statement without よ, the first sentence does not giving any new information so I felt that the exclamation mark was good there, because I reckon that whoever is speaking is really excited about going.

However, the question I really need to ask is, just who are the pandas in the picture? They can’t be Li Li and Shin Shin, they are waiting in the park while these pandas appear to be running for the train. Are Japan Railways, the makers of this poster, implying that pandas roam free, wearing clothes and travelling on trains?

On the Sunday immediately following the biggest earthquake to ever hit Japan things seemed to be getting back to normal in Tokyo. The trains were running on time again and people were going about their business. While Tokyo and Yokohama had received quite a shake, there was very little permanent damage done to any of the buildings around here and we all counted ourselves very lucky.

Over the course of Sunday afternoon it became very clear that the situation developing at the Fukushima Daiichi was very serious indeed. Cutting a long story short, due to combined earthquake and tsunami damage this thing was pumping radiation out into the atmosphere. Almost immediately people living 20km around the nuclear power plant were evacuated. This led to many people wondering if the radiation would reach Tokyo in harmful levels. This spooked almost everybody and many people began to leave Tokyo for other cities in Japan or out of the country altogether.

As a result of the crisis at the power plant, suddenly the whole of the eastern side was seriously short on power. To combat this, the government announced widespread rolling blackouts and trains would begin running at a reduced rate all beginning on Monday.

On Monday I had to go to work.

This proved impossible as the trains where not running and so began a fruitless morning trying to contact my company for some kind of advice. This proved difficult because they were struggling to deal with everything too. Eventually an email did the rounds instructing us to go to our schools if we could make it to the door. Thus a stressful week ensued, I would have to wake up and the crack of dawn, check if the trains were available to get me to school and at least half way back again. It feels like I have done more walking these past few weeks than I have in a lifetime. Once at work I would try to entertain the kids and then trudge off home to be rewarded with a power cut when I finally arrived home. It also didn’t help that people had begun panic buying and hoarding of food. All to the back drop of the increasing problems in Fukushima.

Finally, on Tuesday, the board of education for Yokohama, possibly fearing liability for any complications that may result from all this, cancelled all assignments and effectively began the spring holidays early. This was a huge relief for me because it meant that I no longer had the extra travel stress to worry about. By this point I had read up a huge amount about the dangers of radiation and come to the conclusion (along with advice from the British embassy) that I was in no threat from the radiation. All I had to worry about now was the aftershocks.

Still the ground beneath our feet was disgruntled and perhaps once an hour there would be a mini tremor of some kind, all at various strengths. As I didn’t need to work any more, I decided to take a long weekend break to Kobe. The Kobe break was all very pleasant.

This leads me to the situation today, as I write this the status of the power plant appears to be improving. Despite this, levels of radiation unsafe to infants has been found in Tokyo’s water supply (which has since gone down). Aftershocks are still happening, usually in the morning so they replace the need for an alarm clock. News has come that the blackouts may continue until the end of summer and beyond. I recently collected iodine pills (just in case) from the embassy. Crucially though, news has also come in that the death toll in the north of the country has now exceeded 10,000 people.

Everything that has happened to me has been a mere inconvenience compared with what some people are going through. My heart goes out to them.

Barring any more crazy things happening normal service here on this blog will soon be resumed. Stay tuned for more trivial but fun thoughts from me from the land of the rising sun. A land which finally seems to be waking up to a new dawn.

Walking around in Fujisawa one day I found an interesting poster and wanted to find out everything about it……