Random Japan #14 :: Ting Ting
So goes the train. It crosses here roughly every 5–10 minutes all day from 5am to midnight.
Hmm... looking at the photo again after posting it, it almost looks like a TV capture. Old analog TV that is, not modern HDTV. It's actually an iPhone photo with a piece of cling film over the lens to give more of a blurry quality. Anyway, moving on...
Trains in Japan are quite convenient. They come fairly often and can take you anywhere in the country. Coming from the US where you have to drive to get anywhere, I was kind of shocked the first time I traveled across the country entirely by train, not getting into a car even once.
I'm sure you have all read about how the trains in Japan are never late and how on the rare event they are as much as 30 seconds late, the train conductor personally apologizes to everyone on the train. Uh huh, sure. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The streets are paved in gold too, by the way.
Truth is the trains are late more often than they are on time. The private train companies are often better about it than JR, the national train company, but even they are often late. I think where the myth of always on time starts from is that while they are often late, that tardiness is often no more than 5–10 minutes, thought it can be up to an hour or more in the case of "human accident", i.e. suicide, where someone throws themselves in front of the train, which happens more often than any of us wish it did, at least a few times a week.
5–10 minutes may not seem like much, but train scheduling is often much more ambitious and leaves little extra room for being late, so if you have some connections to make 5–10 minutes can be enough to make you miss the connection and be late to work where you will be yelled at mercilessly by your boss and made to work extra overtime everyday for a few weeks as penance. We often make fun of how salarymen will be sprinting as fast as they can to catch a train even though there is another in just 15 minutes, but knowing the above you might understand why they do that.
My youngest son (1 1/2 years old) calls trains "ting ting", mimicking the sound the train crossing alert makes. I suppose this might be kind of normal, because my 5 year old did the same when he was this age. Or maybe my kids are just strange.
If you like this random photo from Japan, be sure to check out @kaliju's frankly fantastic Random Korea series. The latest entry there is Random Korea #3 - Coffee, Up a Mountain and...Social Wellfare Building!. Mmmm.... coffee...
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Riding ting tings is something that I love doing and prefer over other transport methods.
Dude, that's really creative and the end result did remind me of an 80's vibe movie. I have to play around with covering the lens with random material and see what comes out of it! Super frame man. Thanks for mentioning my series, it helps gain exposure tremendously 👍
No problem, man. I am loving the idea of sister series for Japan and Korea, and moreover I like to support where I can. My upvote value may be basically nothing, but I have managed to network relatively well, so I share what I can.
I have a lot of thoughts about creativity with photography. Write that down as a topic for our unannounced, unscheduled, and unplanned (as of yet) podcast. I'm a big proponent of doing the creativity in analog (and uneditable) ways instead of digital. Let me know if you stumble across any other good material for taking shots through.
And I am with you — trains are the best. If I ever go back to the States, I will really miss the convenience of trains (but hopefully by then self-driving cars will be cheap and safe and everywhere, so that will give a somewhat similar effect).