Restaurant or shrine
Not a sign the place is full
But how you should queue
— Tokyo, January 2025
• • • • •
The queue in Tokyo, whether at a Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine, outside a restaurant or shop, into a museum or through an airport security check, and which can stretch for hundreds of yards, has no relation to the number of people inside, the space available, the tables free or the readiness of service. The queue is not the sign of a blockage (in the movement of the crowd), failure (in the design of the entrance), inadequacy (in the size of the building) or breakdown (in the public order), but, rather, of the condition of entry. The queue, therefore, is a sign of itself, which is a demonstration of the collective commitment of the Japanese citizen to their civic values.
As a guide to which — I suspect largely for the use of foreigners — the metro system is plastered with posters entreating the public not to engage in various behaviours, from talking loudly to taking ‘selfies’, leaving litter or running to catch a departing train. Smoking, which unlike in the UK and in most European countries was permitted in the bars in which we drank, is forbidden in public, with designated ‘Smoking Areas’ tucked away for those thereby identified as the abject, and to which the Japanese queue as patiently and politely as they do to everywhere else.
A Communist in Hong Kong 