A series of photographs by German photographer Michael Wolf called ‘Tokyo Compression’ has gone viral on the Japanese internet, as netizens discovered an alternative way of looking at life in Japan’s capital.
The photographs portray the crammed trains that characterise the morning rush hour in Tokyo; beleaguered bodies packed together; fatigued faces pushed against steamed-up carriage windows. While this may seem like yet another working day to residents of the metropolis, for those who have never experienced the rush hour in major Japanese cities the experience can be somewhat bizarre.
Netizen reactions to the photographs, which range from anger to amazement, are translated below the article from Buzzap.jp that first featured the pictures. The full series of photographs can be viewed at Michael Wolf Photography.
From Buzzap.jp:
Strange? 18 Photographs of Crowded Tokyo Trains As Seen By a Foreigner.
When a foreigner comes to Tokyo to travel, it seems that the ‘crowded train’ which is a familiar sight during the rush hour on weekdays, appears as something quite strange to them.
A crowded train in the Tokyo rush hour, which is said to be the toughest rush hour in the world. In fact, if you live in Tokyo it feels very normal to be packed into a train like sardines, but when you see this again through the pictures, you can almost understand the feeling of a foreigner seeing it for the first time.
The photographs below are by a German photographer called Michael Wolf. The expressions on the faces of the people in the photographs that he took on the Tokyo subway are dark; some people are closing their eyes as though they might be trying to escape their stress; some people frown as they try to bear the pain of the commute.
Comments from 2ch.net:
パンパスネコ(公衆)：
Well, I think the commute is abnormal.
ボルネオヤマネコ(岩手県)：
Even for a country bumpkin like me this is an abnormal scene.
しぃ(やわらか銀行)：
It’s really like the gas chambers they used on the Jews.
ターキッシュバン(東京都)：
It’s more crowded than the trains going to Auschwitz.
チーター(WiMAX)：
This would drive me crazy..
スナドリネコ(長崎県)：
Yeah, because the crowded morning trains in Tokyo are a microcosm of the suffocating nature of Japanese society.
ジョフロイネコ(dion軍)：
Nah, I wouldn’t want to ride a train like that.
マンチカン(新疆ウイグル自治区)：
Why is he being so provocative in the last picture?
バーマン(関東・甲信越)：
You’d be pissed if you got your picture taken at a moment like that. Try to imagine what it would be like if it were you.
しぃ(やわらか銀行)：
The woman in photo 3 looks like she’s getting her nipple tweaked.
縞三毛(愛知県)：
Put it another way: why doesn’t the commute look like this in cities overseas?
Comments from Yutori2ch Blog:
ゆとりある名無し :
Why is he just taking pictures of people’s faces as he pleases? I want to call this kind of guy a fucking foreigner, not just a foreigner [netizen uses kanji for ‘harm’ instead of ‘foreign/outside’; both are pronounced ‘gaijin’ when added to the character for ‘person’].
名無しさん＠ニュース２ちゃん :
Crowded trains are really horrible.
[anon] :
The ‘fuck you’ guy looks really pissed at having his photo taken.
ゆとりある名無し :
Don’t just take photos of other people, twat.
ゆとりある名無し :
Camera voyeurism…
名無し :
The guy taking the pictures and the people who had their pictures taken are both disgusting www
ゆとりある名無し :
Bastards who get on that kind of crowded train without caring shouldn’t get pissed off at having their picture taken like that.
ゆとりある名無し :
Human scum who reveal the faces of innocent people and try to make fools out of them. And the people running this site too. Shouldn’t the pictures be all rights reserved if this kind of photo is taken?
ゆとりある名無し :
When you look at that guy in the last shot, you really understand that people’s personalities come out in the way they look.
ゆとりある名無し :
The bastards who took those photos can all die.
ゆとりある名無し :
Did the photographer himself have permission?
ゆとりある名無し :
I made a mistake above. I meant to say that the guy who slyly took those photos can die. He took them without asking, and then revealed them online. Don’t justify them by calling them artistic work.
ゆとりある名無し :
Tokyo is Japan.
Still, recently the morals of the Germans these days have become even worse than those of the French.
