Please take your terrorist trash home with you
I’ve noticed that most of the private railways in this area have removed all the trash cans from their platforms. Prominently posted signs and regular announcements claim that this is intended to reduce the threat of terrorism. I guess the idea is to keep terrorists from putting bombs in trash cans, but it just seems kind of silly to me.
Call me a cynic, but I think these train lines are just looking for an excuse not to pay someone to remove the trash each day. I’ve noticed, for example, that these same train lines have not gotten rid of their coin lockers, which would probably be as good a place for a terrorist to stash a bomb as a trash can, so I don’t see how it would foil any dastardly plot to blow up rush-hour commuters. (Besides, any serious terrorist knows that the JR Shinjuku Station would be the one to blow up—and JR, as far as I have been able to determine, is keeping its trash cans.)
What it does, though, is inconvenience the hell out of the passengers, who are now asked to take their trash home with them. So please buy a bottle of tea at the platform kiosk, but take the empty bottle home with you when you are finished drinking it. The same goes for the wrapping from your tuna sandwich and the plastic box your o-bento came in. Is that the idea? Nice. Maybe if I actually felt safer, I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t, so instead I just feel less like buying anything at the train station kiosks. I wonder how many others feel the same way. I bet those trash cans will come back pretty quickly if the kiosks notice that sales have slumped after they were removed—terrorist threat or no.
On the other hand, I suppose it would almost single-handedly do away with all the porn you see salarymen reading on the trains all the time. I mean, come on, you don’t really think they take those magazines home, do you?
Call me cynical, but I think this is an effort by Japanese to feel self-important on the world stage. They know terrorists don’t care about them, but they want to be big and important, and acting like they are a target is a way to realize this.
If they had hired new people to check for unaccounted-for luggage often left on racks above the seat benches, I’d be mollified by that much.
Betcha they didn’t. And if they didn’t, then you’re right, it’s a scam--and likely, at the same time, a sterling example of Japanese bureaucracy in action. Do something useless and stupid that has the barest semblance of sense to it, and call it a day.
I don’t know how much terrorists care about Japan, Zak, but there was an interesting article in The Japan Times this weekend about how alarmed the Japanese feel about the March 11 attack in Spain in light of their own reliance on trains for public transportation. Also, the article noted that terrorists are making use of bombs that can be triggered from a cell phone. Put trains, cell phones, and bombs into the same article and suddenly the threat of terrorism starts to seem uncomfortably close to home to the Japanese, I’m sure.
With that in mind, I think Luis is on the right track: This is an example of doing something trivial as a way of making people feel better about a much more serious problem.
There was another interesting article in this morning’s paper about university students in the U.S. who are being asked to create hypothetical terrorism scenarios as a way to identify our vulnerabilities. If we were to look at similar vulnerabilities in Japan, I bet we could find some really glaring ones. When put in that perspective, I think removing trash cans from train stations is a pretty feeble attempt at preventing terrorism.
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