At present, Tokyo commuters are on the threshhold of a biological
revolution more profound since the first multicelled organisms appeared
3 billion years ago. The human race is morphing into a new
form of life where humans will congeal into a single protoplasm,
encapsulated in steel tubes. From single-cell amoeba, we became
multi-celled animals. Now, we are becoming
multi-human organisms... |
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We will all become one undifferentiated consciousness. In the mean time though, there seem to be some momentary problems with distribution of oxygen, disposal of heat and CO2 etc. but clearly we're on the way. Only a few gropers and pickpockets are holding us back. The doorway between conventional reality and the new lifeform also is a bit rough. At my station, the trains were 10 to 12 cars, every 3 minutes in rush hour. Each train has 2000 to 2500 people. Getting into the train takes effort, sometimes. There are 6 or 8 college students on the platform to assist jamming people into the cars... I lived 14 years and rode the trains from this station. 20 stations down the line was Shinjuku, the busiest station in the world, 3 million people transit that *single station*, every day -more than Tokyo station. Soylent Green was filmed there. The purpose of this article is to share some tips and techniques for traveling in rush hour: Getting into a full car Normally you will wait for the surge of people ejected from the car, when the doors open. Timing is essential to get in front of the usual rugby scrum, so that you will be carried into the car by ten or twenty other people pushing into the car. It is like surfing. But you only have 1/2 second, to choose who you want to be jammed into, for the next 45 minutes; a young lady, a middle-aged salaryman... There are two problems with the Scrum approach. 1. Some days there is no sufficient number of rammers behind you or they're all playing the same game, so you must enter without assistance, or, 2. The platform where you are going may be on the same side of the car, and you need to come out the same door--so you don't want to be rammed deep inside the car. So you're all alone, there's 2 seconds til the door closes, and you are looking at a solid packed wall of people, struggling to hold themselves in the train by holding the edges of the doorframe. Run up to the center of the door and turn around facing outward. Squat deeply. Put your ass or lower back into somebody's knees in center of the door who cannot reach the side frame. Do a full leg press, which should be good for at least 100-150 KG of force for most people. This will pop one or two people out of the car. If you act quickly, with split second timing and relentless purpose, you can get into the car at that moment. --Getting some space in the car When jammed into the car you usually cannot move your arms or legs. You cannot blow your nose or scratch. Don't panic. Get used to it. However, there are times when the pressure can be so severe it can be harmful to internal organs or skeletal joints, etc. The first and best tactic if you're getting injured or blacking out, is move to the center spaces far from the doors. There is almost always more space in there. Keep driving in that direction and after a few stations, you'll get one or two meters into the car, where the pressure per square inch is lower. . More realistically, however, the pressure will sometimes require urgent measures. Rotating the body really helps. First, decide which direction you can get the most leverage, and rotate 90 degrees, firmly. Somebody else is going to have some problems, probably... but do it anyway. Obviously you can't just "twist" yourself. There is no way to "twist". First you have to tiptoe, let the other people drop down off you, whose clothing is attached to your clothing. Then you're 4 inches higher, you can rotate and drop yourself in like a peg, rotating maybe 60 degrees at a time. Those of you who have never lived in Tokyo, can best imagine this by jamming a screwdriver into the end of a wet two-by-four. It is pretty tight, isn't it? Well, twist the screwdriver a few times, then. The natural structure of a well-packed subway car in Tokyo is similar to the hexagonal structure of a beehive. Humans are slightly wider than they are deep, thus the crowd will be packed into alternating ranks of ovals, jammed like hexagons. If you shake a box of long hexagons, they settle into a flat structure. On a full train in Tokyo, everybody is facing in the same direction. This is all
well and good. HOWEVER. When the pressure is so great you
cannot breathe, you gotta break with the crowd and put your shoulders
AGAINST the dimension of greatest pressure instead of allowing it
to smash you flat. This usually puts your shoulders against two
people's thoraxes making them unable to breathe but, hey, we didn't
create this stupid system.. Incidentally, NEVER shove the crowd back towards the rear when the
train is accelerating as this will cause a huge dogpile. This
is totally not cool. |