Not Quite Jesse James, But Getting There: Cheating JR

For the grand occasion of the official resumption of blogging I was hoping for a whopper of a tale to tell, seeing as how I've had over a month to incubate...something. Well, I've got a two-fer for you tonight: criminal confessions and sideshow freaks. Hope you like it.

First on the menu is the issue of Japan Railways, a.k.a. JR. Japan is world-famous for its trains, whether it be their shinkansen bullet train fleet or their Swiss time-like punctuality or how you can drink a beer/flagon of mead/glass of absinthe on any train. Well, I'm going to poke some holes in the magic and myth today because I've got a message for the world: JR sucks.

Let me be more specific with that vitriol. JR is not, in fact, always on time. Recently Maia and I have noticed a spate of train tardiness on the Kitakyushu lines the likes of which neither of us could conceive of in this nation. In snow or a driving rain it's understandable, but twenty minute delays on clear days, day and night? I'm not saying it's perennially late, just that it's not as infallible as everyone thinks it is. The main complaint against JR, however, is its price--its bend you over and do you up the pooper price. Dear god is it pricey!

For years I used to think BART was quite possibly the world's worst mass transit system, but in recent times it's really pulled up its socks and gotten on board with new technologies, operational strategies, train renovations etcetera and is looking pretty OK. It's also cheap as sin. Now, let's compare BART with the JR trains operating out of Kokura Station since I now know that area so well. From Castro Valley BART to the Embarcadero station in SF is a distance of approximately 45 km, costs $8.60 round trip and takes about 32 minutes. From Kokura Station to Ushima Station (which I never use, but is convenient for this example) the distance is also 45 km and, depending on whether one takes the express or the local, takes 28 and 52 minutes, respectively. Now here's the zinger: for round trip tickets the local will set you back ¥1,820 ($20.41) and the express costs a massive ¥3,620 ($40.60)! Uh...WHAT?!?

It's railway robbery and, damn it, I won't (sometimes) take it (if I have a chance). While there are cunning stratagems online involving countryside stations and ticket shenanigans Maia and I prefer two simpler methods. The first we can implement on our return trip to her apartment from anywhere as long as it's after 8PM, which it so often is anyways with us. The station nearest her house has no attendant after that time and no camera so we simply buy the cheapest ticket (¥100-something) and hop the barricades. No fuss, no muss. The second is much more fun and for the craven adrenaline junkies of the world: hiding on an express! As the demonstration above proved, express trains are on the order of twice as expensive as normal trains and thus each train employs ticket checkers who hop from car to car. They are fastidious in their duty and have uncanny memories of faces and who's sitting where, so it's no use to hope they didn't catch you lounging there in their peripheral vision. But there are two loopholes here: they won't check sleeping passengers or the bathrooms, so and those are your safe spots. Buy a local ticket for the place you're going, if it's night pretend to sleep, daytime hide in the crapper and arrive at your destination way earlier than you would have otherwise. This doesn't save you a dime over the local trains, just time...and the satisfaction that you've stuck it to The Man in a completely inconsequential way. And if you happen to be trapped in a bathroom with a beautiful female companion, well, all the better.

Oh, another factoid about the suckage of JR, to get from Fukuoka to Osaka via bullet train takes about five hours and takes a chunk out of your pocketbook to the tune of about $200 one way. An airplane will cost about the same and take only an hour. Unless people are in the know about the environmental impacts of air travel there's absolutely no reason to take the famous shinkansen. Simply wow.

And now onto other, happier news! Yay! Eyepatch women! Yay!

WHAT?! Well, the eyepatch fetish--yes, there is a fetish surrounding them--has been well documented in Japanese culture and is old hat to many, but it finally took a sort of critical mass of cumulative observations to understand where this is coming from. It hit me in Fukuoka last week before Maia and I went to the "Capsule" concert (more on that fiasco in another post) when I saw yet another woman wearing a white, obviously medical eyepatch. I thought to myself "man, you never see this many women in The States wearing eye patches." And suddenly I realized that Japanese women must--MUST--be genetically predisposed to eye injury! So, as part of my ongoing community service in the gerbil-in-pants gambling case here is PSA list of no-nos for all Japanese women:

--DO NOT drop a pencil or eating utensil near tables or office equipment featuring a sharp corner.
--DO NOT look end-on at your chopsticks to see if it's really really straight or ever so slightly wobbly.
--DO NOT take up knife juggling.
--DO NOT take up knitting.
--DO NOT engage in a "who can stare at the sun the longest" contest for a prize of less than ¥5,000 or a goat of average size.

I'll get to the bottom of this eye thing before it's time to leave, I swear it!

--Matt