Alex Quinn's Japan Journal

9/21/2004, Watching kids make a death walk to avoid paying train fare

Generally, to ride the train, you buy a ticket and put it in a machine as you go through the gates.  Tonight, I saw some kids skirting the system.  You see, there's a rail about 10 inches wide that passes along top of a big staircase.  You could theoretically walk along it to avoid the gates.  However, if you fell, you'd fall maybe 30-40 feet onto hard, concrete stairs.  You could easily die.  So, it never seemed like much of a security risk for the train company.  Well, tonight, I saw not one but 5 high-school age kids scurry across the rail.  They motioned to me, asking that I not report them.  What I really wanted was to take a picture, but I dared not for fear that I might startle one of them and make him/her fall and die.  Anyway, these were some brave kids.

I wanted to take a picture of the rail, but it's hard to get a picture that captures the depth.  So, I took a really crappy 40 second movie trying to capture the depth of the space.  It didn't come out very well.

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