Your World. On Time.

Yes, FedEx had a very similar slogan a few years back, but they've since changed it. It's now "Relax, it's FedEx". I sort of liked the old one better. And being in Japan, it really gets under your skin. You've probably heard that punctuality is important in Japan and while people ARE late sometimes (they're not robots, despite what the economy and stereotypes are famous for), things always run according to schedule.

Take, for instance, one of my older students in my English class. Her lesson starts at 1:30 and she walks through the door when the clock (and my watch) shows 1:30. I've been teaching her weekly for nearly two months and she has yet to stray from that time. And it's not the west coast idea of "on-time" where its punctuality "give or take 5 minutes". Her margin for chronological error is down to the near side of 2 minutes. I don't know how close or far she lives, but it still rather intrigues me when this kindly old grandmother strolls in at 1:30.

And it's not only starting on time too. Tournaments, for example, said to end at a certain time are usually all packed up and ending at that time. The Japanese run a pretty tight ship and it's not long before you get on that ship and start aiming for that strike of the hour to show up for something.

The other part that promotes such promptness is that lots of people take the train, and the trains here, like they are known for in Germany of Switzerland, are accurate to the minute. It takes a lot of planning to have this many trains run this close together to move nearly 12 million people in Tokyo, so it's no surprise that they are accurate.

But taking the trains regularly means you're subject to this accurateness so if you leave work at your regular time, walk your normal pace to the station and get on your regular train, you're bound to get where you're going are almost exactly the same time, every time.

The punctuality begets more punctuality until your schedule is refined to the minute. And because transport is so important, it eventually sorts out the rest of your schedule for you. I certainly always have to fight the tendency to want to be "fashionably late" but here, fashion is only what you wear.