Schedules

A young woman beside me on an Inokashira line train one evening pulled out in succession: the train schedule; the bus schedule for buses from the Kichijoji terminal; a computer-generated schedule for work for the following week; a hand-written appointment book; a sort-of form letter detailing the time to arrive at the train station for a weekend trip to an onsen, including train departure times, check-in times, tour times, meal times, free time, and return time. For the rest of the idle train time, she perused a Pia magazine, marking the times and places for films, TV shows, and future concerts from among the extensive listings. She occasionally checked her cellular phone to see what time any calls might have come in.

Life in Tokyo involves intensive scheduling. Tokyo is woven together by schedules. Most Tokyoites have a storehouse of memorized times. Opening hours, vacation schedules, film and music showings (noting the ending time of certain musical performances is always particularly surprising) are all decided clearly and carefully and well in advance. Train schedule books are too heavy to lift.

There is great clarity in all this, but a kind of claustrophobia as well. One doesn't always want to know exactly when a concert will finish, or exactly which bus and train one will be able to catch afterwards.

The huge dividers on train station platforms detailing exact arrival and departure times for the local, express, limited express, commuter express seem like shrines to time. Days are marked out precisely into temporal divisions, with only slight weekend variations. Passengers stop to worship, their fingers running along in the air, eyes glancing nervously at wristwatches or at the ever-present overhead clock. Soon enough perhaps, seconds will be added after the minutes on these schedules.

Time has already sped up for trains. Until several years ago, the automatic safety braking system on the Yamanote line required trains to depart in three-minute intervals. This was improved to allow two-minute departures, thus greatly reducing overcrowding. Ten seconds were then shaved off to allow for 1 minute 50 second departure intervals. The problem then became loading and unloading people fast enough through the doors. It took too long to get everyone on and off, especially at rush hour. The number of doors on the trains were then increased to six from four, with interior benches substantially reduced, to allow for quicker and easier flow off and on. The 110 second interval now works.

Just the same, the trains are often late. The Chuo line is regularly stopped on its east-west cut across the Yamanote circle by "human incidents," a euphemism for suicides. The effect of one suicide is to delay millions of commuters. The illusion of order, once punctured, collapses quickly and completely. A vast ripple of lateness spreads out through connecting lines, secondary subways, station platforms and occasionally up and out to station entrances, where long lines of non-commuting commuters pool quickly into irritated clumps. The form letter apology notes that station attendants hand out always look hastily notarized, particularly on the Chuo line.

When a late night train was delayed for over two hours, police were called to help control a mob. Passengers demanding to get home attacked station attendants. For Japanese, who rarely break into open, public anger, lateness is apparently an unforgivable provocation.

Nowadays, the omnipresence of cellular phones allows convenient re-scheduling and ample apologies. Even cell phone usage is charged by time, though.

There's rebellion though, of course, and few words capture the delight in unscheduled time more than the word "nonbiri." When unregulated time becomes a limited luxury item, it becomes an even greater pleasure. Wasting time in a coffee shop, standing reading a book in a store, walking aimlessly, shopping without intent, daydreaming, fooling around, and talking too long on the phone (even if timed and charged), all fit under the umbrella of "nonbiri." This term describes an infinite pleasure, an all-consuming joy in doing something that changes time to timelessness.

"Nonbiri" is the psychological pleasure in non-temporality -- the emotional experience of time. The exact opposite of schedules. Time felt becomes the flipside of time written down.

And while this experience of time is perhaps one that often has to be worked for, set up, taken off for, even, ironically, scheduled in advance -- it is that state of unscheduled openness for which Tokyoites so often long; and enjoy to such an extent that it is rarely admitted to, hardly spoken of, and when it is mentioned, it is with the fleeting embarrassment of a genuine, profound and in Tokyo, at least, all too rare, a pleasure.

--Michael Pronko