The Daily Life Of An Osaka Businessman

How to survive a 4-hour, crowded train commute 6 days a week - for forty years... Each day over a million people pour into Japan’s three major cities, and almost all of them arrive by train. Few can afford the rent in downtown Tokyo, so when they get hired by a company at the age of 21, they know they’ll be commuting two hours every day for the next forty years. How on earth do the Japanese manage to survive a situation that would drive a Westerner insane? In a densely crowded society, etiquette is everything. In Japan, most of those rules developed to maintain harmony despite the lack of space. That people almost never touch each other, no matter how tight it gets. And when contact is unavoidable, nobody takes it personally. But most of all, the Japanese know how to create a space inside themselves. When necessary, they just withdraw into their own world. Where Westerners waste a lot of energy fighting off the crowds, they hardly seem to notice them at all. Even the train station eaterie