I've seen these posters and love it!
The Tokyo Metro came up with a series of cheeky posters about minding your behavior on the train — I find it hilarious because the trains are extremely quiet compared to other countries’, so I don’t see that there’s a need for them. In fact, the hushed silence in the trains freaked me out a little but I come from Southeast Asia and we’ve got a noisy culture when we board the bus or train.
I suppose quiet comfort in the train in important in Japan because there’s such a huge number of people commuting and it’s common to travel as long as two hours from your home to the office. If you have somebody who has loud music blasting from their headphones or taking up two seats instead of one, you would feel thoroughly annoyed after a couple of hours, I suppose.
The Manners series kicked off with “Please do it at home” and among these my favorite is this one below. I have definitely seen women fixing their makeup with a big hand mirror for their entire train journey and the average travel time here is about 30 to 45 minutes within Tokyo. But I don’t really see how this would affect other passengers unless said culprit keeps jabbing her elbows into her neighbor’s ribs.
Summer brought on this one and it’s the coolest so far in the series. I’ve definitely seen salary men transform into action heroes as they leap between closing train doors.
I only ever see rowdy peeps on the last train after a night of drinking, though it seems the norm to take a tall can of beer on the shinkansen (bullet train) even if it’s 10am in the morn…
I wonder how many more quirky posters they would come up with….?
Photos: courtesy of Jean-Marc Rocher
