19 September 2025, en route from Tokyo to Jakarta
Facial recognition seemed like a good idea. Having purchased my ticket online for the Keisei Skyliner to take me from central Tokyo to Narita Airport, the site gave me the option of registering for facial recognition. Why not, I thought. No need to scan your ticket; as you approach the barrier it will just open! And so it did. Imagine! Just think how much calmer the tubes in London would be were TFL to adopt the same technology.
Of course what the site didn’t say was that you still needed to have the ticket! You were expected to redeem the emailed QR code at a scanner to receive a paper ticket, and then not use the ticket for the barrier. However, the ticket had a secondary purpose because on the ticket was your allocated seat reservation. All seats reserved. This may have been implied, but was not stated.
This was my first brush with Japanese inflexibility. What I have learned is that within this wonderful societal system, you’re fine as long as you conform. Heaven help you if you don’t. I should have realised my mistake when the charming but insistent young woman, in a largely unoccupied carriage, pointed out that I was in her seat. And I was. I guess in the same position in the West, I might just quietly have sat in one of the other (many) empty seats. But this is Japan, and I suspect she knew that were she to be flexible, she might create a similar moment of awkwardness for someone else if they were to want to come and claim the empty seat she had taken. Having screwed up, I incurred not the wrath of the train conductor but what felt like his disappointment – an experience that was repeated as I tried to pass the ticket barrier at Narita. Isn’t the disappointment of others so much harder to bear than their anger?
Though it would be easy to fume about Japanese inflexibility, this, in the end, is about courtesy: always thinking of the other, and designing systems and processes that allow – nay encourage – people to live symbiotically and harmoniously. The rules of the system are paramount and boundaries are strictly observed because it makes sense for them so to be. When everybody does as they are expected, everyone has a great time.
Years ago, in my pre-seminary days, a very wise older priest with whom I lodged for a year while working in a parish taught me three rules for happy ministry, two of which were fundamental systemic principles (though at the time I didn’t realise that!). One was about the inadvisability of offering open choices when more limited options were just as acceptable (i.e. never ask choirboys what they want to drink, but rather ask whether they would like x or y to drink). Another was about how surprises are almost always disruptive in systems and are best avoided (so, “tell them once, tell them twice, then do it!”). Welcoming (in hindsight very generously) members of my family to stay at Christmas that year (clergy, by the way, generally hate having guests to stay at Christmas and even more in Holy Week), he said, “well, we will all have a wonderful time if we all do as we are told!” And he was right. Conformity makes for contentedness. Going off-piste – while supposedly liberating – is often a recipe for unhappiness. The Japanese understand this deeply. And, thankfully, deal with those who transgress with deep (if slightly disappointed) courtesy.
But what I will take away from Japan is not the memory of inflexibility, but of the courtesy in which and with which everything is enfolded – and the ‘bowing’ and habituated smiles that attend every encounter. I very much hope it is infectious – for I can think of nothing I’d rather take away and give to others!
(Oh, and I still think they need to be clearer about the tickets on the Keisei Skyliner!)