A Salaryman Sandwich Please!

Ask anyone what the five most famous things about Japan are and they will probably reply, in some order:

It had nuclear bombs dropped on it.
They eat raw fish.
It's got lots of really flash electronics.
Something else.
and
The trains are crazy.



Sadly we may never see this in real life, scenes of people pushing into trains like zombies from Day of the Dead, as the video is actually from a bygone age (90s).

Us foreigners, and not a few Japanese, will probably look at this and think wow, those people must really wanted to get to work. A few of them couldn't just turn around and wait for the next train? Would that have been so unrealistic?

But you look at the video again and, wait a minute, is this actually getting any of these people to work faster...?

A nominally full train (rather than packed-to-bursting, or chock-fucked) would have closed its doors a full 60 SECONDS EARLIER than does the train in the video. Ergo the result of squeezing an extra 5% of people onto the train is to delay the train by 60 seconds.

During rush hour, the average time between trains at many stations is 3 to 5 minutes, which means, if the 5% had waited between an extra 2 and 4 minutes for the next train rather than attempt to body-block their way onto an already-full carriage, them and an additional 95% of people could have got to work probably a bit quicker.

(These calculations are obvious and true)

So where does the benefit lie? Why is this happening?

So I say, it's mob law. Give a certain Japanese person a suitcase, a full train, a line of similar people, and some closing doors, and they turn into Millwall fans on a Saturday afternoon (unthinking hooligans).

And may I say how this could remind someone of the market?

Stand outside popular opinion to see where the true benefits lie.