Train-themed Japanese green tea

For just over a year now Mokku Company, purveyors of novelty drinks, assorted confectionary and miscellaneous goods, have also offered a brand of green tea contained within a E231-style container. Read more »

J-railways concerned with train suicides

I’ve posted a small item already about the blue lighting employed by some J-railways in an attempt to dissuade and deter the anxious and depressed from committing suicide beneath their trains.

This related item takes a rather more general view of the problem and relates it directly to the famed punctuality of the Japanese rail system. The general thrust of the article highlights executive frustration with the suicides, their apparent helplessness to prevent them and an honest admission that the complex and numerous reasons behind suicides are not a concern for the rail companies.

Fact is, they’re businesses – that’s the bottom line here, surely. There’s very little they can actually do to improve the lives of, or counsel, the suicidal, but short of erecting platform barriers at every Tokyo station, there seems little they can do to stop those determined to end their own lives.

Read the whole article HERE

Shibuya to Ebisu via Yamanote Line

Shibuya to Ebisu (anti-clockwise) – an interesting short video from the Youtube channel of lylehsaxon.

I’ll probably feature more videos from this YouTuber from time to time. I really like they way they capture incidental snippets of life in Japan.

Please visit his channel when you have a moment.

JR East address suicides with blue lighting

East Japan Railway Company have installed blue light-emitting diode lights in all 29 stations of the Yamanote line as the number of  suicides in Japan rises again. Although the company admit there is no scientific proof that blue lights deter suicide, the hope is that they will have an effect on people with troubled states of mind:

“We associate the color with the sky and the sea,” said Mizuki Takahashi, a therapist at the Japan Institute of Color Psychology, a private research center that was not involved in the lighting project. “It has a calming effect on agitated people, or people obsessed with one particular thing, which in this case is committing suicide.”

JR East has seen 68 platform suicides since March this year alone – up from 42 for the same period two years ago.

Yamanote Halloween Party 2009

Since the early 90s there has been something of an unofficial tradition for (predominantly) foreign revellers to gather on a pre-arranged Yamanote Line train and hold a Halloween party involving much drunken singing and dancing.

The merry-making, however, has gained a certain amount of notoriety for the disruption to the service and general behaviour of those involved.

The planning for this year’s party is already underway… Read more »