山田栄子

Outsiders sometimes assume that morning commuters in Tokyo are cold strangers who only stare at their phones and never get involved. At 9:15 a.m. on July 22, 2013, at Minami-Urawa Station north of Tokyo, a woman in her thirties slipped and fell waist-deep into the eight-inch gap between the concrete platform and a thirty-two-ton steel train car. She was pinned tight against the undercarriage, and the train could not move an inch without crushing her. Modern Japanese commuter trains rest on pneumatic air-spring suspension bogies designed to tilt slightly when weight shifts. The moment a station attendant blew his whistle and called for help, passengers inside the car immediately stepped off to remove ten tons of human weight. Then forty strangers in business suits and summer shirts lined up shoulder to shoulder along the platform edge. Without knowing each other's names, they pressed their bare hands high against the stainless-steel wall and pushed together on a single count. The thirty-two-ton train car tilted backward on its springs by several inches, and attendants pulled the woman out without a single scratch. The crowd clapped once, stepped back onto the train, and rode to work just eight minutes behind schedule. That is what a high-trust society looks like when a stranger is in trouble.