Walk This Way

About the only thing I've ever taken away from math class is that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line (unless you've seen the crazy shit that was Event Horizon, but let's leave that movie out of this because it gave me nightmares as a 13-year-old).  I also recently saw that a research attempted to explain why human beings instinctively cannot walk in a straight line, and I am just going to come out and say that this researcher did not have to go out of his way to blindfold people and watch them walk around in circles for hours.  He could have just stood in Yokohama Station and watched Japanese people attempt to walk in a straight line while either staring at their feet (I do not understand why there are so many that do this), staring at their cell phone (I am guilty of this from time to time when I'm attempting to text, but I do occasionally try to lift my head to make sure I'm not going to run into an unsuspecting おばあさん. This is not for their safety, however, but for mine because those women would take me out) or just generally staring off into space and having no goddamned clue as to where they're going.

And Yokohama Station has to be the worst.  I have seen a lot of subway stations in my time (my grand 26 years) and Yokohama is the only station where I walk out consistently angry at every single pedestrian that walks a Gordian knot around the station.  I was talking to Haitham the other day about Times Square station which is an absolute disaster in terms of design - subways lines miles apart from each other underground - and yet somehow with people trying to go from the ACE on 8th Ave all the way back over toward Broadway, everyone manages to mostly stay out of each others' way (at least the New Yorkers do... the tourists are another story) and it is never bedlam like it is in the main corridor of Yokohama Station.  However, that central passage of Yokohama Station where you have people coming from both ends of the JR lines and the underground malls and all sorts of hallways that lead back to the center is not the biggest offender.  The worst place to try and walk around in Yokohama Station is definitely the corridor where the traffic from the East Exit and the Sotetsu lines joins with the wickets for the JR lines, the City Subway and the escalator that heads down toward the Tokoyoko/Minato Mirai Lines.  I walk through it every morning now that I'm on foot going to school and there are some days where I want to just scream "FUCKING WALK STRAIGHT."  It's not helping my blood pressure.  Here, I made some pictures with which to better illustrate:

Obviously this picture is drawn to scale; I am like the giant Alice in the house after eating the slice of cake in this country most of the time.  You should tell it's me by the big hair and the even bigger headphones. My goal is represented by Braveheart Mel Gibson.  The various arrows are to try to demonstrate the supposed flow of foot traffic through this corridor, but as you'll see in a couple of pictures, this is a false representation. 

 

Being a semi-reasonable person most days of the week, this is what I imagine my walk should be: just like they taught me in math class.  However, this is what I see in front of me on a daily basis:

And I can't even demonstrate to you which of these lines is someone running, some jerk on their cell phone, or some guy walking in concentric circles for the hell of it.  I ran an experiment this afternoon thinking I was going to do a post like this later and decided to walk along the crack in the tiles near the yellow strips laid out for blind people to use in navigating the station (what a fucking nightmare that must be) to assure myself that it is possible for me to walk in a straight line.  Yes yes, I know there are flaws in this control group, but I swear it is not me that's the problem here.  I got stuck behind people wandering at a diagonal, a guy coming at me texting wildly on his cell phone only to look up at the last second to realize OH SHIT I SHOULD MOVE, and the like.  

The other thing that drives me crazy is just how SLOW everyone is.  It is jarring when there's an actual person who passes me on either side because it happens so rarely.  You'd think they had absolutely nowhere to be, which could very well be the case.  There are frequently the people who meander through the crowd and force others to go around them, and I just don't understand!!!  Aren't we mentally designed to try to avoid collisions and to react if something foreign moves in too close?  

And of course, once I've navigated myself out of the nightmare of that bottom corridor, I gradually make way up stairs to the main concourse which is overrun with a crush of people, but at least these folks seem to know where they're going in that most of them walk with some kind of purpose.  GOD and don't get me started on trying to use the escalator here.  I understand that you walk on the right here and stand on the left, but there is always someone who feels they should go against the grain and stand on the right hand side, even if there's space next to them in the standing aisle.  WHYYYYYYYYY?!  Or even worse: those jerks that walk really slowly up the right side and then fucking STOP several steps before they reach the top.  YOU ALREADY WALKED THIS FAR WHY ARE YOU STOPPING OH MY GOD I'M GOING TO STRANGLE MYSELF.  Or do one of these:

So here's one thing about Japanese culture I refuse to assimilate to.  I am going to walk like a New Yorker until the end of my days... which might be soon considering the fact I feel like my temples are going to explode some mornings.  I'm getting mad just thinking about it, so I'm going to add another moving gif that never fails to make me laugh:

I also love whoever thought to do this with Facebook's new layout:

Should be a blue ghost, though...

Okay, I have to leave it here because I haven't started my homework yet and it's 9:30.  We just had our final for afternoon class today and yet somehow still have to slog through morning classes and then stupid kanji review in the afternoon.  I HAVE NO MOTIVATION SENSEI, CLEARLY.  LOOK AT THIS POST.  I have other stories from the weekend and also need to update on my plans for winter break (seems I may get that Japanese New Year after all), but I'll save that for the next post.  For now, I leave you with some not-so-random pop culture references:

This clip went onto inspire this:

I've heard conflicting stories about inspiration; the popular story Aerosmith tells is that they wrote "Walk This Way" after seeing Young Frankenstein, but in their 1997 autobiography (surprise!  It's also titled Walk This Way, and YES I READ IT. I was a huge Aero-head back in the day) Steven Tyler insisted it had a much dirtier meaning.  In either case, I prefer the original 1975 version to the remake with Run DMC (no embed available, so go watch it at the source linked here), but that is still worth listening to.  The video is also 80s-tastic.