“Knock and the door will be opened to you.” I was never a particularly attentive Sunday school student, but there are some traditional injunctions that you can’t help but absorb when growing up in a particular culture. To a large degree, Westerners are encouraged from childhood to seek solutions to problems. Difficulties big and small should not be endured but resolved.
Which is why it can be so whiplash-inducing to live in Japan and see how people quietly tolerate situations that I think would be so easy to improve. My most recent example took place at the sports club I infrequently frequent. Seated on a stationary bicycle, there’s nowhere else for me to look but at the three TV monitors directly ahead, each displaying a different local station. On this day, one showed the news, another a talk show, and the third was a drama which at this moment showed a junior high-schooler being raped by a much older man (no clothes came off, but one got the general idea.)
I looked around the room. It was about two in the afternoon. There were half a dozen other people on bikes and Stairmasters, and they were all facing the same direction as I was. Did no one else object to seeing this? Regardless, I called one of the club trainers over and told him I wasn’t happy with the TV channel. “Which one?” he asked. I was stunned that I had to explain. “Does everyone here like watching that drama?” He finally got the idea, but he was obligated to ask whether anyone minded if he changed the channel. Only one other person could even be bothered to respond: a grandfatherly sort who shook his head in solemn disgust. The channel was changed; the problem was solved.
Yet time and again I have seen problems – at least I thought they were problems – left hanging because people couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger, or lend a helping hand, or even offer a simple opinion. More than once I have gotten on the train or a bus on a hot day, only to find that someone had opened a window and left it open, letting the AC gush out of the vehicle. Was it so hard for anyone to close the window? Or take the person in the wheelchair patiently waiting for the elevator (which, incidentally, was clearly marked as having PRIORITY for people in wheelchairs), only to see the door open and the elevator crammed with people with two healthy legs – was it so hard to suggest (as I did) that someone ought to get out and take the escalator located four meters away?
My “favorite” incident occurred while waiting in a throng of commuters on a platform for the morning train. Like everyone else I was just thinking about getting to work, when I did a double-take and looked at the man standing on the opposite platform – a man with his pants wide open who was happily playing with himself for all to see.
I couldn’t believe my own eyes, so I looked up and down at the people on my platform, wondering who else was shocked to see this. The answer: nobody. By a singular coincidence, everyone was looking in every other possible direction. They looked at the arriving train, at their newspapers, at the sky – anywhere except at the man. I got the sneaking suspicion that everyone was studiously avoiding gawking, because to acknowledge the problem meant having to do something about it. I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. “PUT YOUR PANTS ON!” I bellowed. My students later complimented me on how brave I was to shout at a man on another platform. “He could have had a knife,” they said. I don’t doubt that some nuts out there do, but this guy wasn’t one of them: He panicked, zipped his trousers and bolted.
I’m not trying to be a saint or anything. I’m just saying that I believe many things around us can be improved with just the barest minimum of effort. If an individual thinks something is a problem, I feel it is perfectly acceptable to question it, challenge it, and responsibly act upon it. Even the smallest of reforms is worthwhile. One of my tiny goals in life is to find out why some stores in Japan will have entrances with four doors, but two of them will be locked. Wouldn’t it be safer for everyone if all of the doors were unlocked? Wouldn’t it be sensible to change things?
But I guess that’s why people in Japan so seldom knock upon the door. They figure that the damn door is locked anyway.
by P.Sean Bramble
American / Writer and Teacher
