Chaos and Order

Japan may be a yelling-at-you-to-buy-things and a yelling-at-you-to-vote-for-me culture, but there's no doubt that it's far more orderly and peaceful than most places in the world, especially when you're away from the big city. Matsuyama feels becalmed. Somehow even at the busiest times, the bicycles and cars and trams and people competing for space on the narrow streets never become a chaotic crush.

(looking north toward the Gokoku Jinja in Matsuyama)

The closest intersection to my guesthouse is four-way. It feels like a T-intersection, because on the north side, facing the tall hill outside my window, the road is narrower, paved in a different color, and flanked by a torii gate. The road that passes under the torii leads to a Gokoku Jinja 護国神社 (literally a "shrine for protection to the nation", this is a shinto shrine honoring the spirits of those who died fighting in Japan's wars). Both intersecting roads have just one lane in each direction. The intersection is governed by a traffic light, pedestrian walk signals, and crosswalks. It's not by any means a particularly difficult intersection for bikers or pedestrians to negotiate. At rush hour, however, two policeman are stationed there, wearing blue shirts and white helmets, holding bright orange sticks, big whistles hanging from cords around their necks. They are there to help pedestrians cross. (The picture above was taken at rush hour; if you click through to the larger you image you will be able to make out the figure of one of the policemen, near the red arrow on the right side of the road.) When the light turns red, they step out into the road, bright orange sticks held aloft, whistles perched lightly but firmly between their lips.

As far as I can tell, their presence is completely superfluous. The cars have always already stopped at the red light. I've yet to hear a whistle blown even once.

Perhaps it's precisely because they are so unnecessary that the presence of these policemen seems so reassuring. Japan's Matsuyama is so deeply enmeshed in good order that a breakdown of it is inconceivable. Almost inconceivable. Just in case fear of the almost inconceivable is worrying you, rest assured -- the traffic cops are in place to deal with the one-in-a-million contingency of someone not stopping at the light.

While I've been in Japan I've been reading Peter Hessler's "River Town", about his experiences teaching English for the Peace Corps in a small city on the banks of the Yangtze River in Sichuan. (In many ways his experiences overlap with ones that I've had in the past living and traveling in China, making it an especially interesting read for me.) His city, Fuling, is like Matsuyama a somewhat remote but not insignificant lesser city. But these two places couldn't be more different in terms of atmosphere. It's an odd sensation, reading a book that stirs up memories, sometimes quite visceral, of my time in China; yet in the context of my easy life here in Matsuyama, those memories seem especially unreal, almost unimaginable.

Here's an excerpt from Hessler's book describing the noise and traffic in Fuling:

"… [V]irtually every cabby in Fuling had rewired his horn so it was triggered by a contact point at the tip of the gearshift …. They honked at other cars, and they honked at pedestrians. They honked whenever they passed somebody, or whenever they were being passed themselves. They honked when nobody was passing but somebody might be considering it, or when the road was empty and there was nobody to pass but the thought of passing or being passed had just passed through the driver's mind …. a college friend came to visit … for five years he had lived in Manhattan, and yet the noise in Fuling absolutely stunned him; he heard every horn, every shout, every blurted announcement from every loudspeaker. When he left, we took a cab from the college to the docks, and he … counted the honks as our driver sped through the city. It was a fifteen-minute ride and the driver touched his contact point 566 times. It came to thirty-seven honks per minute."

I have heard a car horn honked exactly once here in Matsuyama.