11/08/2020 JMB: Caesar, In and Out of Elevators in Japan

In and Out of Elevators in Japan

Terry Caesar
English, Mukogawa Women's University, Japan

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Abstract: Elevator space in Japan is considered both as an example of transit

space generally and as an example of the practice of a particular national
identity. The paper argues that there is an intimate relationship between the
social script outside the elevator and variations possible on this script inside the
elevator. In Japan, these variations serve to express the improvisational, private
character of personal interaction possible inside elevators, over against the
fixed, public character of behavior outside them.

Every morning in the apartment building where I live I take the elevator six floors down.
One morning a woman appeared with her bicycle as I was waiting for the elevator.
Though we live along the same corridor, I had scarcely seen her before, and we had never
spoken. Japanese public behavior in residential space is customarily limited to either
reserved nods of recognition or restrained “good mornings” and “good afternoons.”
Everything changes at the elevator, as I was especially surprised to see this particular
morning.

Suppressing my annoyance (a bicycle takes half the space in the small elevator), I gestured
for the woman to enter when the elevator arrived and the door opened. She acknowledged
my courtesy, and positioned herself inside. There was just room enough to accommodate
me in front of her. As the elevator descended, suddenly I felt a hand touch my collar, and
smooth it down over my tie! “Arigato gosaimas” (thank you very much), I managed, when
we reached the bottom floor and I could turn to face the woman. She smiled faintly and
bowed in turn.

I was stunned for hours afterwards. Japanese never touch. It's not even customary among
themselves when they meet to shake hands. So how to explain why this woman would so
casually reach over and adjust my collar? In public! And yet, not exactly. The space of an
elevator is small enough, and, perhaps more important, brief and ephemeral enough, to
admit a private character. Therefore, an individual can relax, and accord another a degree
of warmth inadmissible once the elevator doors open once more. My moment of contact, I
concluded, could have only happened in an elevator, and then perhaps only in Japan.
Suddenly the mundane seemed luminous with an entirely different meaning to transit
space.

1.

Japanese courtesy is a staple of every handbook on the country designed for foreign
consumption. In a typical recent one, The Inscrutable Japanese, organized around a chapter-

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by-chapter series of pointed questions, the following explanation is given in response to

the question, “Why do Japanese yield to each other?”: “Behind this custom lies the desire
to be part of a group. Japanese value group harmony, and they don,t like to stand out”
(Hiroshi, 91). That is, Japanese are so courteous because their feeling for each other is
already constituted--by their culture, by their very language--as collective in nature and
consequence. What foreigners see as “courtesy” is in this sense merely an expression of the
felt implication of their lives, each in one another. No wonder that they like to describe
themselves, according to Ian Buruma, as “'wet and yasashii.' They stick together in mutual
dependency like 'wet', glutinous rice, so dear to the Japanese palate. ... They express
themselves by 'warm, human emotions', instead of 'dry, hard rational thought'” (Buruma ,
219).

But this stereotype (as Buruma terms it) only operates according to very strict rules for
public behavior. The Inscrutable Japanese strives to explain, for example, the cultural
imperative against direct confrontation that results (to the consternation of foreigners) in
Japanese saying “maybe” so often, or the ethical significance of learning kata [proper form]
that comprehends (to the misunderstanding of foreigners) why Japanese appear so rigid in
exchanging business cards. Nonetheless, the presumption of such a handbook is that
unless you are Japanese it is finally very difficult not to see Japanese public behavior as
severely “marked” in virtually every manifestation, and therefore as finally too ceremonial
and cold -- or, ironically, rather the opposite of the stereotype that the Japanese have of
themselves.

Behavior at or near elevators would at first seem to follow from this presumption. Upon
entrance, there is always some hesitation about who goes first among a group of people.
Everyone is usually so pleased to yield to everyone else that there is often a real danger
that no one will actually get into the elevator before it leaves. Once inside, the person
nearest the floor buttons is quick either to press a button for everyone else's floor, or at
least to demonstrate willingness to do so. Consideration of others is often so extreme that a
person exiting will not only excuse himself or herself – sumimasen (“excuse me”) being
once more the most operative word in Japanese public life -- but press the “close” button
so that less time will be lost to those remaining in the elevator.

Yet if life outside the elevator dictates the social script by which people conduct
themselves at entrance and exit points, behavior inside the elevator is another matter.
Transit space is of course fluid by its very nature -- too short in duration to fit very
securely into the continuum between public and private behavior. In Japan, people are
prepared to speak to each other more freely in elevators, rather in the manner of
Westerners, and much in contrast to their behavior in the halls or on the street. In these
more open, commodious public realms, quick nods of mutual recognition -- visual or
verbal -- suffice. In the more restricted space of the elevator, however, questions are often
ventured, opinions expressed, or even greetings exchanged that have a more expansive
character.

Even a foreigner should not expect to be surprised to be spoken to in an elevator by

someone who would normally refrain from speaking to him outside it. I do not think the
mere fact of physical proximity explains this. Of course it does to a degree; people who
find themselves close to each other are inclined to speak to each other, or at least find it
less comfortable to avoid doing so. However, in any particular country they are neither

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inclined to speak to each other in the same way, nor for the same reasons, Transit space
reveals cultural specificity like few other kinds, because such space consists in peculiar
negotiations among the resources of both public and private social interaction.

Japanese behavior inside elevators is so distinctive because it is determined by the

opportunity momentarily afforded for its felt relaxation from the burdens of role-governed
behavior outside. The relaxation is culturally weighted by two specific factors. Although
the second is more decisive than the first, as I will argue, granting each of these factors is
crucial to understanding why such a mundane occasion as behavior in elevators becomes
so fascinating and elusive, as well as instructive and important for the study of transit
space generally.

2.

It is impossible to talk to another person very long on an elevator, which functions

exclusively to get its occupants to a fixed destination, because the floors of a building occur
in such quick succession. Hence, elevator time lacks duration. This does not mean,
however, that it lacks opportunity; indeed, one of the things that the study of transit space
in general demonstrates is that the its temporal coordinates, no matter how ephemeral,
will be made nonetheless to perform social work. Depending upon the society, as well as
the person, the limitations on conversation in an elevator can be either a great pity or a
great relief.

To Japanese, they are both. The very brevity of the conversational horizon can yield an
intensity that one can see invested in a wide range of other cultural phenomena, ranging
from haiku to sumo or fireworks. The Japanese word for the latter, hanabi, or literally
“flower fire,” suggests a link between their fleeting beauty and its most celebrated cultural
manifestation: the cherry blossom. We should not be surprised that the occasion of an
elevator enables the operation of a venerable cultural code, in which precisely because
something does not last long is the reason to invest it with significance and value.

For Peter Singer, this special feeling for brevity can be erected into a metaphysical
principle: “[a Japanese] is satisfied with short moments of fulfillment rapidly shattered as
cherry blossoms are, and even his fighting spirit was often said not to be well sustained.
Able to show great bravery, bordering sometimes on madness, he does not like to endure
long hardship and adversity. Unlike the Russian, he prefers suicide to silent despair”
(Singer, 30). Such discourse is of course rather wildly unfashionable in sociology today. It
posits a national essence, rather than proposing to examines a cultural construction.
Furthermore, Singer assumes a condition of changelessness, and disdains the
modifications of social development, much less the claims of history.

Behavior in elevators constitutes, I would only argue, one means to try to articulate
something about national identity, as well as an especially distinctive way of studying
how national identity, in turn, illustrates behavior in elevators. Japanese are attracted to
attenuated temporal coordinates--in this case once established inside the elevator--for
precisely the reasons others might despair of them. Suddenly, smiles can be ventured.
Courtesy can allow or even risk disclosures of additional emotion. Suddenly, there need
not be so much fear of being self-conscious. Talk will not last very long. Indeed, it may
barely be possible to get started. Behavior inside an elevator therefore assumes the

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character of something exquisitely ephemeral, poignantly revealing, even surprisingly

candid.

In effect, the space inside the elevator is so circumscribed by the public realm in Japan that
it becomes private. Just so, it seems to me that we cannot ask in abstract terms whether this
space is public or private, even if the most obvious initial factor remains the nature of the
building in which the elevator operates. (Hence, the larger or more commercial the
building, the more open its elevators to being governed strictly by public codes.) The
distinction between public and private space is often difficult to stabilize in actual social
practice because transit space is transit space precisely because it is unstable; roles are not
clearly delineated, and so the easiest available role is often the suspension of any particular
one -- until the elevator door opens (or the train door), and social life can resume, scripted
as before.

In Japan, nonetheless, I would maintain that elevator space is subject to much less
individual negotiation or even suspension The space is private, if not entirely
unproblematically. The primary reason is simple: virtually all other space is far less
unproblematically public, including all other forms of transportation, ranging from trains
and buses even to private automobiles, which must be open to more public monitoring --
speed limits, toll fees, parking restrictions, maintenance checks -- than vehicles in any
nation on earth. (Foreigners new to Japan are surprised to see so many people relaxing or
sleeping in cars, as if to reclaim their lost private dimension.) The easiest way to
understand the common behavior whereby the person leaving the elevator first presses the
“close” button is as a concession to the privacy of the remaining occupant or occupants.
Just so, this same privacy is what prompts the person entering the elevator to apologize for
doing so.

Once inside, what Erving Goffman venerably terms a “participation unit” is immediately
formed (Goffman, 21). Of course the same unit is incipiently constituted everywhere in the
world, any time an elevator door closes. But it does not always function -- when it does --
according to rules at variance with those outside the elevator door. Not only is the brief
duration of the circumstance inescapably manifest as an opportunity for social interaction
rather than as an inconsequence. In addition, the peculiar kind of participation possible
inside an elevator in Japan is purchased against a formidable array of prohibitions,
inhibitions, and sanctions concerning human relationships outside it. Each of these has a
highly public character, which, in effect, robs the slightest contact between individuals of
its potentially casual, accidental, or, in a word, mundane quality.

The inside of the elevator restores this quality, if only for a few instants. Speaking of the
fact that relationships must both begin and end, Goffman writes elsewhere concerning a
peculiar kind of farewell in which (because of death or geography) participants are about
to be inaccessible to each other: “In these latter cases, a farewell can occur that marks the
simultaneous termination of a moment or two of being in touch and the relationship that
made being in touch in that way possible” (Goffman, 90). Precisely. The nature of human
participation inside an elevator in Japan is that the contact is so fraught with farewell from
the very moment of initiation that it terminates without having become a relationship at
all. Such relationships are very rare in Japan. Or rather, the space for them is. Therefore
this space exists to be cherished, even if it begs to persist almost beneath notice.

3.
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It is undoubtedly the case that every society on earth has a considerable political
investment in its transit spaces. Some monitor them more than others. However, the space
of an elevator -- now that the attendant who operates it (and by extension enforces orderly
behavior) has fast become almost everywhere in the world an extremely rare figure -- is
not easily subject to surveillance. In Japan, at least, this particular space tends merely to be
left to itself. It may be because people are taught to respect others, and, on the whole, they
do. (For a recent popular explanation of the historical background, see Reid.) Even so, no
less than any other people, Japanese are not without principles contrary to the society in
which they find themselves.

How to make these principles manifest? For men, after-work bars – the world of the
infamous “water trade” -- can be seen as too prolonged, too systematic occasions. (For an
incisive portrait of such establishments, see Morley.) People need mundane moments as
well as significant ones in order to act out their own purely subjective or occasionally
individual needs. Indeed, for these purposes mundane occasions are arguably the more
precious, because they can be entirely free or careless of any sort of rationalization.

How to find such occasions? Perhaps they are best understood as given rather than found.
Transit space generally exemplifies them, and moments inside elevators in particular, at
least in Japan. Of course this particular space abides as endangered, just as it does
anywhere else in the world, and for the same reason: video cameras. These cameras are
ubiquitous in modern society: in department stores, fast-food restaurants, offices, and of
course elevators. They attest, if not to the relentless public definition of space, at least to
the public claim that everywhere exists to be made (for whatever purpose) on space of any
kind. One thing the study of elevator space in Japan reveals is that this claim is never made
without resistance, even in a society whose formidable traditions of law, precept, cultural
memory, and ethical wisdom would seem to rule out individual dissonance.

Instead, in a sense, the dissonance is made possible through one of these traditions: an
exquisite sensitivity to the inside. Patrick Smith is the latest of a number of commentators
on Japan who have called attention to the duality of outside and inside, the enclosed and
the exposed, which, he states, is “the first thing to confront the arriving visitor. The
standard term for oneself is gaijin, outside person. It is one's first notice that life in Japan
will consist in a series of acceptances and rejections. Nothing is excepted” (Smith, 40). So,
he continues, Japanese life can be comprehended as a series of variations on this duality,
including everything from families, sports clubs, and companies to walls and paper
screens. The reason elevator space in Japan is private is because it is seized by Japanese as
a chance to create yet another inside.

Insides are not exclusively private; there would be little urgency to create them if they
were not exposed to outsides. But insides always have a private coloration -- won as it
were over against the greater force of outsides, which are always public. (Compare in this
respect the present furor over the existence of the ubiquitous “handy phones,” so beloved
of teenagers; these phones represent to Japanese a scandalous eruption of personal
opportunity or whim into public life, and so the public service campaign against the use of
these phones on trains or at meetings emphasizes their rudeness.) The nice thing about the
emotional coloration of the inside of elevators is that we can see how private behavior can
suddenly and momentarily reveal itself without shedding its public guise.

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Private energies, in other words, need not be wholly effaced, for they need not be
disruptive if expressed. Of course, once more, it helps immensely if the occasion is staged
on a very small scale and is very brief. A final example: The other night I worked late in
my office, and then took an elevator down, as usual, when I left. A woman got on at the
third floor with a small cart. She inclined her head, upon entrance, and excused herself,
faintly. Nothing surprising here. But her smile was, along with the fact that she stood to
one side, facing me, rather than in front, with her back to me. One of those intricate little
dances of civility ensued when the elevator stopped on the first floor. The woman gestured
for me to precede her out. I, in turn, gestured for her. She was pleased to accept, and each
of us was delighted to act out our respective acceptance with a degree of fervor unlikely to
transpire away from the elevator.

Did we have to act this way? No. The social participation made possible by the inside of an
elevator can remain inert, or wholly governed by the rules outside it. As it was, what
further chances exist for extending the ephemeral moment of sociality that obtained
between the woman and me? None. Or, to put it another way, further chances that could
exist would cease to be charged with the peculiar intimacy that the most mundane
occasions suddenly possess in Japan. They possess this intimacy because the social
disposition of public space normally forbids it. But then the study of the mundane, I think,
reveals that public space is never limited to what it forbids. Otherwise, none of us would
have anything to bring to our relationships there, and social life may as well consist of
empty action, going up and down like an elevator, with no inside and nobody to occupy it.

Works Cited

Buruma, Jan. Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Gangsters, and Other
Japanese Cultural Heroes. New York: Meridian, 1984. back

Goffman, Erving. Relations in Public. Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Harper
Books, 1971. back

Hiroshi, Kagawa. The Inscrutable Japanese. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1997. back

Morley, John. Pictures from the Water Trade. Adventures of a Westerner in Japan. Boston:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1985. back

Reid, T. R. Confucius Lives Next Door. New York: Random House, 1999. back

Singer, Peter. Mirror, Sword and Jewel. The Geometry of Japanese Life. Tokyo: Kodansha
International, 1971. back

Smith, Patrick. Japan: A Reinterpretation. New York: Vintage, 1998. back

About the Author: When not taking elevators, Terry Caesar teaches American
literature in the graduate program at Mukogawa Women's University in Japan.
He has either authored or edited six books, most recently Traveling through the
Boondocks, his third collection of essays on what might be termed (to use an

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elevator trope) the “ups and downs of academic life,” has been just published
by SUNY-Albany Press.

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