Common Sense and Sensibility

Kids loose... everywhere

It's great to see children just walking around without their parents, crossing the street, going to the shops by themselves. In London, or England generally, kids aren't even allowed to play conkers without a safety harness for fear that some 'nut dust' might lodge in their larynx, causing them to trip and headbutt an old woman. As a capital city, it is refreshing to see that Tokyo hasn't descended into an almost masochistic cycle of risk-prevention.

Here in Tokyo, people hop off their bikes, leaving them where they stand, without fear of them being lifted. When they're on their bikes, people seem happy to ride anywhere that gets them to their destination, relying on common sense to prevent crashes with people. As such, the pavement is almost as busy as the road. "Surely not!" I hear you say. "There must be hundreds of people injured every day in such anarchy." Not at all. Thank goodness Tokyo allows people the freedom to use their own nouse.

Here you can drink in the streets, tubes, and trains. Despite thousands of people throwing themselves in front of trains every year (Tokyo does, after all, have one of the highest suicide rates in the world), no attempts have been made to make stations safer. In fact level crossings often have nothing but a gestural barrier that uselessly flops down when a train is passing, and most people I've seen are happy to start crossing the tracks even after the barriers have begun to lower. In my area of Tokyo there's a sword shop just down the road, yet there aren't hoardes of rampaging youths going round slashing each other to bits. How about the pedestrian crossings here, which all zig zag through each other in a manner that would give most risk-eliminators a heart attack?


Removing risk isn't the only way to prevent danger. More often than not, trusting in people not to do daft things like walk into the middle of a train track or cycle into your legs is enough. This is one of the qualities that Tokyo has immediately revealed in my two weeks here. More of the same please!