A Startling Effect

I have experienced a certain phenomenon while in Japan. As you know trains can get pretty crowded, especially during rush hour, and there is a certain demographic of people who I have now labeled as the most dangerous during this time. Old Japanese Women. You see them standing outside the train door looking very serene. Sometimes they're reading, other times they're speaking lively in Japanese with their friends. But something happens to them when they breach the line that divides the station from the train. They become snarling wolverines, lashing out at any passenger who stands between them and an open seat. Old women tend to gravitate towards open seats on the train, and by gravitate I mean sprint. It is incredible. I actually saw an old lady quickly shimmy to an open seat that a Salaryman was clearly about to sit in and put up a well placed elbow to the small of his back before sliding into his seat. Once in their seats they guard them like a hyena over a fresh kill. Only once the train has come to a complete stop and the doors are about to open do they relent and give up their precious. This, unfortunately, leads to another situation that I have been a part of many times.
Getting off the train seems like a simple task. Everyone is going in the same direction and is slightly hurrying as well. But, I have found, no matter how fast the crowd moves, there is always an old lady behind me pushing me out the door. And I mean that she places her forearms on the small of my back and uses me as a human shield against the crowd. I would bet that even if people sprinted out of the doors of the train there would be a grandma putting on running cleats so that she could still get some good elbows in.
This leads me to one other point of interest. Way too many people run inside the station. And I'm not talking about a person hustling along in a hurried manner, I'm talking about people sprinting through the crowds as if their child was home alone, and on fire. I sometimes think it would be courteous for the train staff to set up a booth that could dole out small cups of water to these people as they sprint by.
I'm going to round out this post by bringing it back to an actual true-to-life story that I witnessed not four days ago. I was on the train and the announcer came over the loudspeaker saying that the doors were closing. This normally means that there is a 4 second window to get on the train. At that time I spotted a small old lady coming down the stairs to the platform. She heard this announcement as well and started to hustle. "No way." I thought as I saw her start to pick up her pace down the stairs. Her pace did not pick up immediately though, she was more like a ball gaining inertia as it rolled down a steep incline. So by the time she got down the stairs she was literally flat out sprinting. The doors started to close while she was still about five paces away, and then she did the impossible. A small old lady in a nice flower print dress leapt at the closing doors of the train. Not only did she make it, she had already pounced on a seat and had her knitting needles out within the next second. I had to smile to myself for the rest of the ride.