Cross-cultural communication （72）　

72) Riding the Metro
In April 2018, the Osaka Municipal Subway was privatized and renamed Osaka Metro.
New York and Paris, where I lived overseas, are both cities where the subway has long been an essential part of daily life, and the history of the subway in these cities is much longer than in Osaka. Please join me as I share some episodes related to the subway in these two cities.

It seems that the subway in New York has an image in Japan of being dirty and dangerous. That is certainly not entirely untrue. However, the dirty subway cars covered in graffiti that I lived in 30 years ago have since been replaced with new stainless steel cars imported from Kawasaki Heavy Industries that have been designed to prevent graffiti. Also, in terms of danger, it was the same 40 years ago and it is still the same today, so there is a considerable risk if you use it at night. The main reason for this is that there are few passengers at night. However, during the day, even on the line that connects Manhattan and Brooklyn, there is no particular danger, and it is used as a means of transport for the citizens of New York in the same way as in Japan. By the way, in American English, the subway is called a subway, but in British English, it is called an underground or a tube.

The Paris subway is called metro. The Paris metro, where I spent two and a half years from 1995, was in a sense more dangerous than the New York subway in the early 1980s. In Paris, I certainly didn't feel my life was in danger, but there were a lot of pickpockets. Even though they were pickpockets, they would surround you in a group and snatch your wallet or bag and quickly escape. The victims are often people who are defenseless and unlikely to fight back, such as mothers with young children in pushchairs. The criminals are almost always gypsy groups, and there are usually children among them too. Of course, this is a crime in France too, but the French seem to have resigned themselves to the fact that stealing is one of the gypsies' jobs. I myself was almost a victim once. The train pulled into the station, the doors opened, and just as I was about to get on, a group of boys on the platform surrounded me and stuck their hands into all my pockets. I had my hands firmly on the pockets on either side, so I wasn't robbed. I made a snap decision and stayed on the platform instead of getting on the train. The pickpocket group, having decided that it wasn't going to work, scattered off like a swarm of spiders. A few minutes later, a boy came up to me from the shadows and said, “Monsieur, I found this notebook on the platform. He handed me the schedule book I had in my back pocket. I hadn't noticed it, but there was no doubt that he had picked it up. But he returned it to me, so I smiled and said ‘merci’ and took it. He returned something that wasn't worth anything. I was strangely impressed that it was their occupation.

In the Paris metro, there are people who perform arts in the underground passageways and inside the trains, and they make a living from it. Singing is the most common, and there are also comic monologues. Sometimes, there are people who have no arts and simply complain about their own hardships. One time, there was a performer who put on a puppet show in ten minutes using a device that cleverly made use of the poles and straps inside the train car. Of course, after the performance, almost all of the passengers around me, including myself, paid some money as an offering.
There were also entertainers in the New York subway, but the quality of the entertainment in the 1980s in New York and the 1990s in Paris seemed to be better in Paris.

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