It’s Friday night in Tokyo. All week long, from Monday through Friday, salarymen have gotten up early for the tedious commute to the office, worked long hours at their desks, and then endured the tiresome commute home. For many of them, the routine repeats week by week, year after year.
Friday night offers a break from the routine. After a long week of stress and hard work, the salaryman looks forward to an evening with his colleagues – drinking sake, complaining about work, eating yakitori or ramen. It is a time to let go of his inhibitions and blow off steam. He can be free from the office routine.
One small cloud hovers over the Friday night activities: the last train home. In Tokyo, the trains, both the subways and commuter trains, stop running around 1:00 AM. The trains start running again at 5:30 on Saturday morning. To get home, the salaryman must plan ahead to board the last train.
This year I spent many Friday evenings on train platforms waiting for the last train, watching salarymen as they rushed to catch it. The platform is crowded at that time of the night, sometimes hectic but also surprisingly quiet and orderly. The drama plays out not as a boisterous group of salarymen, but usually as a lone salaryman or occasionally two together. Most of the photographs were taken at Ikebukuro station or on the Yamanote line train.
Ikebukuro station also is the last stop for some Yamanote line trains. Most of the passengers rush from the train to catch another connecting train or run to the taxi stand. Some times, though, a salaryman, overtired from the work week and having drunk too much, falls asleep on the last train. What happens then? The train crew try to wake him up so he can continue his journey – or at least get off the train. Where does he go from there? That is a question for a future photo series, I guess.
This exhibition is part II of my salaryman series. Part I was “Salaryman on the Train,” which was exhibited last year at Art Space Motor Gallery. The third and final part of the series will focus on what salarymen do from the time they leave the office until the time they board the home-bound train. Often this means getting together with fellow salarymen at a bar or izakaya, the so-called “nomi-kai” (drinking meeting). Will that be the final chapter in the series? Discovering salaryman culture is like peeling an onion: each layer reveals another layer beneath it. I wonder what would be the fourth chapter?
Visit the gallery Japan: Salaryman