The 4.17 Tozai Line train from Nish-Funabashi is usually relatively quiet when it stops to pick me up at Myoden station, 2 stations later. For the first few stops, the passengers are mainly school and university students, housewives, the elderly and infirm and non-salarymen who looked slightly crazed at having fallen through the cracks of the employment system. As the train goes underground, the last of the students are replaced by salarymen and office ladies (charming terms that actually-quite-accurately portray the sexual-roles in the Japanese office), returning to their companies after meetings. They get off at the seven-or-so big stations, and are in turn replaced again by more students and housewives as the train comes out of the long 15 stop tunnel, back in Tokyo suburbia. The train is us usually quiet and peaceful, a Switzerland in the WW2 of afternoon commuting, but with less Nazi-stolen Jewish gold.
Yesterday, thanks to the colder weather, it was a little worse than usual, although still miles from the morning face-in-armpit-of-filthy-unwashed-passenger-next-to-you-horror. I was sitting at the end of one of the rows of seats (the prized position that I get for getting on the train early on, and which I, now fully assimilated into Japanese train etiquette, will relinquish to no old-lady, handicapped passenger or pregnant women), and next to me, in the ample standing room by a door, stood a youngish woman in a long anorak. Everything seemed normal. The train pulled into Kudanshita station, usually the last of the major salaryman alighting points. I happened to notice a man get up from the seat next to where the woman was standing and start to pull his suitcase (obviously returning from a business trip straight to the office - good boy), to get off the train. His hand (the one pulling the suitcase), brushed the woman's jacket briefly for just a second while the man was looking the other way to pick up his newspaper from the seat. As he unknowingly continued to get off the train, the woman exploded with a torrent of abuse:
"Youfuckingpervert! Don'tyoufuckingtouchmeup! Youdirtyarsehole! Whothefuckdoyouthinkyouare?! [Seeing that he had not realised she was talking to him] You with the suitcase, You.Stupid.Fucking.Arsehole! Yeah YOU! Don'ttouchwomenupyoupervertI'mcallingthepolice! PERVERT!"
By this point about five other people had got off the train terrified of her, the man had wandered off, shaking his head and I was sitting there, giggling into my book. I have never, ever, seen anyone explode like that on the train before. Quite amazing. I started wondering; maybe she had been abused before on the train (apparantly one-in-two women in Tokyo have), or maybe she was just in a foul mood, or maybe her child had been snatched by one of the notorious Tokyo dingoes? Then, a couple of stops later, as she got off the train, I noticed that she had been reading from the preparation book for the upcoming TOEIC (English proficiency) exam. It all became clear. She was just another example of what can happen when you teach an ordinary citizen something as subversive as the English language...
