No Need For “Excuse Me”
One aspect of train culture that visitors will either get used to very quickly or never get over (just ask some of my friends who visit) is the fact that people often bypass the etiquette of saying “excuse me” when squishing past people getting on or off a train. This would come across as rude to a lot of visitors, but at the same time it’s reasonable to figure that if you were to say “excuse me” to every single person just to get off, let’s say, the Chuo line at Shinjuku station during rush hour, (focus on the people crammed inside the train) you would never reach the doors in time before they closed. This isn’t to say that people never say “excuse me” at all, but there’s no reason to really consider it as being “rude” when they don’t.
This was actually an interesting point of reverse-culture shock for me during my first return back to the States from Japan about two years ago; there were occasions during rush hour in Boston where a fellow passenger would literally order me to step outside the train during passenger disembarking because I was being “rude” standing in the way. In Japan such a scenario is virtually impossible; I would simply either get pushed into or out of the train depending on the direction of the movement of the crowd. When it comes down to it–at least in Japan—everyone’s just too busy trying to get from point A to point B with the least amount of difficulty to be bothered with directly confronting anyone to get them to move out of the way. The best thing anyone can do in such a situation is just “go with the flow” and enjoy the fact that for a society so centered around manners, this is one code of etiquette that is okay to completely disregard.
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