Tokyo –
You begin by reverting to clichés, some of which are almost as old as Madame Butterfly herself:
You, as a foreigner, are a guest in Japan. Further, you are an ambassador of America.
And Tokyo’s 9,834 taxi drivers have got to live, too, you rationalize. They’ve got wives, kids, TV sets to pay off. Some work eighteen hours a day. Many of them sleep in their cabs. The pay is paltry, averaging around $100 a month. Numerous customers, as police files will verify, simply dash off into the sidewalk crush without bothering to pay the meter tab.
Give them a break, you counsel your fellow expatriates, most of whom are confirmed Kamikazephobes. They aren’t all hellions on wheels, you say.
Then, still aglow with ever-the-twain-shall-meet camaraderie, you hail a 130-yen cab near Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel. Grinning, the driver whips his orange Cedric sedan out of the blurring maw of traffic. He flicks a secret switch. An automatic door pops open and off you scoot.
Nothing Kamikaze about that, was there? He stopped – half the battle won already. He smiled. He didn’t demand that you pay triple, in advance. He didn’t even insist that you take off your shoes before getting in.
There is, however, one small item amiss.
Your long, American legs are still dangling somewhere out there in the street. For the past fifty meters your driver has been dragging you bodily along the boulevard; and doing so in plain view of approximately half a million people, all of whom smile sympathetically and cluck their teeth. But for fear of becoming involved – especially with anyone as immune from prosecution as a Kamikaze cabbie – not one of them does a thing to help you.
Later, when you get out of the hospital, you begin to understand if not applaud the public’s apathy. Much of it stems from the Japanese government’s traditional tolerance policy toward Tokyo’s hotrod hack-pushers.
The recent “crackdown” against errant cabbies by the Tokyo Metropolitan bureaucracy is a case in point. Forced to respond to the public outcry, from both Japanese and the foreign community, officials promised to get tough.
“Our Kamikaze cab drivers,” one zealous, and ecology-minded, civil servant announced, “are a shameful example of character pollution. Just like smog, they must be eradicated.”
The government’s first half-hearted ploy was to require that all drivers display their registration cards, which include their name and photo, on the windshield of their taxi.
This was intended to counter the Kamikazes’ habit of cruising entertainment districts such as the Ginza at club-closing time and refusing to haul any passenger who refused to fork over at least treble the standard fare. The theory was that the extorted customer would take down the driver’s name and turn him into the police.
It didn’t work. The foreigners for the most part couldn’t read the name on the registration tags since they were written in kanji, or Japanese script. And the Japanese, historically complacent and long suffering, didn’t want to become entangled in the red tape required to report an offending cabbie.
“Shikataganai,” the people would shrug. “It cannot be helped.”
Not all of the Japanese, though, were so philosophical. In Kobe, a seaport south of Tokyo, one citizen took direct – and violent – action. Angered at a taxi driver who ignored his hailing, he pursued the cab on a commandeered bicycle, caught up with it at a red light and hacked out its windows with a Samurai sword.
Some Tokyoites, Incensed over the Kamikazes’ failure to respond to their quick bye-bye wave – the Japanese method of hailing a taxi – did complain to the authorities. They claimed that instead of taking on fares first-come, first-carry, the cabbies sought out those pedestrians who held up three fingers, meaning they would pay triple.
The Transportation Ministry listened politely. Then, maddeningly, they pulled most of the teeth out of their new get-tough-with-taxis law.
The Ministry did this by announcing a sort of Kamikaze manifesto listing seven valid reasons for a cabbie to refuse a fare:
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If the customer is too drunk to tell the driver where he wishes to go – or if he looks as if he is so swacked that he might, uh, barf in the cab.
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If the customer’s clothing is dirty, and likely to soil the taxi’s upholstery.
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If the customer demands a discount in fare. (There’s a switch!)
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If the customer is carrying explosives – or is transporting a corpse.
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When the customer’s baggage is too bulky for the trunk.
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When the customer’s destination is more than thirty kilometers from Tokyo.
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When the driver is going to eat or rest, or is on his way back to the garage at the end of a shift.
What the manifesto did, in effect, was to give the Kamikaze seven ready-made, and legal, alibis. In the unlikely event the police call him to task, one or more of them is certain to apply.
Kamikazes (it means “Divine Wind,” after the typhoon that devastated Kublai Khan’s invasion fleet as it approached Japan in 1281; the word was later applied to the Japanese suicide pilots of World War II) are often accused by foreigners of discrimination. They claim the drivers slow down, see that they are gaijin (foreigners), then roar away.
The Kamikazes, knowing that it is now illegal to bypass gaijin, deny any such bias. But privately they admit that they’ll go out of their way not to pick up a Caucasian. The gaijin, they claim, don’t speak Japanese, have a tendency to be short-tempered and talk so loudly it distracts them from their driving. Also, they are so tall they often hit their heads getting into the taxis – and the drivers get blamed for it.
Some foreigners, however, do more than simply swap Kamikaze horror stories. One, an American, tried slipping a silk stocking over his face whenever he flagged a taxi. He looked like the Masked Marauder, but apparently his technique worked.
“It solved the discrimination problem once and for all,” he contends. “Oh, a couple of times the drivers asked me about the mask, I told them I was a professional wrestler. Either that satisfied them or they didn’t want to lose their cool by pressing the issue further.
“At any rate,” the American (who speaks fluent Japanese) added, cabs no longer whip by me as if I had bubonic plague or something.”
In defense of the Kamikazes, it should be pointed out that taxis are one of the few bargains left in super expensive Tokyo. The standard charge is only 130 yen (about 36 cents) for the first mile and a fifth. For each additional quarter of a mile the meter clicks off twenty yean (a mere 7 cents.) At that rate – unless the driver is a “Long-Way Corrigan” who jacks up the fare by pretending to be lost – you can whiz around a good portion of the world’s largest city for three or four dollars.
But if your driver does get lost, don’t automatically assume that he is gypping you. Many of the Kamikazes are country boys, lured to the big city by the neon promise of adventure, pretty girls and wealth. They honestly don’t know where they are most of the time – an understandable shortcoming in Tokyo, where even life-long residents sometimes get lost in their own neighborhoods.
One Tokyoite, in a recent letter to the editor of the Japan Times (an English-language daily that received more than 1,000 letters last year from readers complaining about the taxi situation), claimed that he rode with a Kamikaze who “actually begged” him to point out the Emperor’s palace. A strange request. The Imperial palace is located in the heart of downtown Tokyo, covers 284 acres and is surrounded by a moat half a block wide.
The taxi industry itself deserves some of the blame for the Kamikaze image of its drivers. Last December, a Taxi Modernization Center was opened In Kanda, a Tokyo district famous for its secondhand bookstalls. The Center tried to start a drivers registration program, to scold misbehaving drivers and to inaugurate a welfare plan for the cabbies.
Then the taxicab companies, who were supposed to maintain and finance the centers backed off. Pledged to contribute 30,000 yen (about $86) per vehicle per year for the program, they claimed that business was so bad they could put up little or nothing. The plan died of corporate inertia.
It is true that the Kamikaze cabs are part of the ethos of Tokyo. There are even humorous aspects to their madness. Recently, for examples an enterprising Kamikaze pawned his taxi. There was only one catch. It wasn’t his to pawn. The company that owned the vehicle was utterly humorless about the whole thing – and fired the driver on the spot.
But for the person unfortunate enough to own a car in Tokyo, the Kamikazes really do take on the aspect of a suicide squadron. Wheeling their little Cedrics, Toyopets and Glorias with tire-scorching abandon they run red lights, weave from lane to lane, “skate” along wet streetcar tracks, Ignore speed limits (there are almost no motorized traffic police In Tokyo) and cut in on other cars with scant centimeters to spare.
Thanks to their suicide tactics, Tokyo leads the world in auto accidents. It isn’t all the fault of the Kamikazes, of course. But they do add measurably to the toll; and they also set a dangerous precedent for other drivers, particularly the daredevil young.
What can be done about the Kamikazes? First the laws will, literally, have to catch up with them. Mass traffic is something relatively new in Japan; only in the last ten or fifteen years has it been possible for the average guy to afford a car. Most traffic legislation is of pre-war vintage as a result.
Secondly, people (it has been suggested that an anti-taxi boycott be organized) will simply have to complain louder and to the proper officials. The cop on the corner with his transistor earphoned in to the ball game couldn’t care less about what a cab driver does, or doesn’t do.
Thirdly, the Kamikazes themselves will have to be re-educated.
For most of them, hopefully, that Indoctrination won’t be as traumatic as the one undergone by a Kamikaze in Tokyo’s Shimbashi quarter.
Ired by the driver’s demand for “triple money,” the customers – who happened to be three young, world-wise bar hostesses – pulled off their stocking garters and sprung to the attack.
“All we tried to do,” one of the hostesses later told an enquiring Japanese reporter, “was snap some sense into his head.”
A good object lessons indeed, But, unfortunately, Tokyo’s Kamikaze cab drivers, pursuing their own peculiarly introverted machismo at a hundred kilometers an hour, rarely get around to reading the newspapers.
They are too busy living up to their reputation and, all too often, committing either suicide – or murder – in the bargain.
Received in New York on March 26, 1971.
©1971 Darrell Houston
Darrell Houston is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner on leave from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This article may be published with credit to Darrell Houston, the Post-Intelligencer, and the Alicia Patterson Fund.
