UENO — Two kinds of time trouble follow me around, and only one of them is worth a paragraph. The first is jet lag, which is real, tedious, and has nothing to teach anybody: my body is keeping East Coast hours in a city that gave them up long ago, and it will right itself in a week the way it always does. The second is the interesting one. Tokyo is thirteen hours ahead of home. It is also eleven hours behind home. Both are true — I have checked, more than once — and the fact that I have to check, that I cannot tell you without counting on my fingers and usually getting it wrong whether the people I left are in my past or my future, is the most disoriented I have ever been by something I understand completely.
The arithmetic is not the problem. A clock is a circle, home and here are two points on it, and you can travel between them the short way or the long way — eleven hours back or thirteen forward — and arrive at the same reading either direction, give or take the small matter of which day it is when you get there. What makes Tokyo the maximal case is that it sits almost exactly across the dial from where I started, so the two arcs come out nearly the same length. “Ahead” and “behind” stop being facts about the world and show themselves for what they are, a choice of which way to walk, and when the two ways are the same distance the choice has nothing to recommend one over the other. The word “now” keeps its meaning. What it loses, out here, is its sense of direction.
This is, I have decided, sufficient grounds for a weekend edition. The blog keeps a weekday rhythm that quietly assumes I know which weekday it is, and just now I would have to count. So consider this the first of an irregular Saturday series, filed from the far side of the dial — which sets me down, conveniently, on the one subject this series cannot seem to leave alone.
My previous posts from Europe were all, underneath, about position. A good transit map is an honest lie about where things are; the hard part of a rail network is never the famous tunnel but the invisible coordination behind it. The series kept circling one point: position is not a fact you read off the world, it is a convention you agree to. I had been thinking of this spatially. The clock is the same lesson in a register I had not bothered to look at — there is no “now” the clocks all share, only a grid of agreements about how to label one instant differently depending on where you stand,1 and a seam in the Pacific where those agreements, having circled the globe, must part ways by a full day or stop adding up. Whether that leaves home thirteen hours ahead or eleven behind is, fittingly, not something the world decides. You decide it.
The system that should not cohere
In the spring I wrote that the London Underground is a small miracle: eleven lines and some two hundred and seventy stations, assembled over a century out of competing private railways, and it coheres — one ticket, one fare, one diagram. I held it up against the cross-Channel network, a toy by comparison, which a national regulator had spent two years refereeing a four-way fight over. The lesson was that coherence is hard even when the object is simple. Tokyo is here to tell me I had no idea how easy I was grading.
The rail map of this city is the most intimidating diagram anyone has ever handed me.
JR East, the Metro, the Toei lines, and a row of private operators — Tobu, Seibu, Odakyu, Tokyu, and more — run services that cross, merge, and in places run straight through one another, a train belonging to one company continuing down the track of another without a single passenger aboard noticing the border. Separate companies, separate books, separate shareholders, and one tap of one card carries you across the whole of it. By every measure of structural complexity it dwarfs London, and it coheres harder. Ueno, where we are staying, is one of the great knots of the thing, a station you could mistake for a city. The bottleneck, once again, was never the engineering. It was the agreement.
The coherence has a birthday, and it is here. Asia’s first subway opened beneath Ueno at the very end of 1927, a stub of a line running the short distance to Asakusa, and in its first days people queued for as long as two hours to take the five-minute ride. The man who built it, Noritsugu Hayakawa, had stood in London in 1914, looked at the Underground — the same network I was admiring all spring — and concluded that his city needed one of its own. Four companies held franchises to dig Tokyo’s subway. Only one of them dug. His line and a rival’s were folded into a single public authority in 1941, which is the part the brochures hurry past: faced with two subway companies, the first thing the city arranged was to stop having two. Consolidation is the easy kind of coherence. You do not reconcile the boundary; you erase it.
The hard kind arrived in 1960, when a new municipal line opened in the east of the city and, for the first time anywhere in Japan, let a private railway’s trains run onto a public subway’s tracks and simply keep going. The boundary stayed exactly where it was — two companies, two sets of books — and the trains crossed it as if it weren’t there. Once the trick was proved it spread, line by line, until it became the signature of the whole network. A train that begins on one company’s rails out at Narita airport now carries you through the heart of Tokyo and back out to Haneda on two further companies’ tracks, and you never leave your seat; the corporate borders pass beneath you as invisibly as the prime meridian. The map I was handed is the residue of sixty years of rival firms agreeing, one line at a time, to honor a boundary by ignoring it. Nobody drew the coherent thing. They negotiated their way to it, and the negotiating is the whole story.
The agreement reaches all the way down to the escalators. In Tokyo you stand on the left and leave the right side clear for the people in a hurry, and I cannot do it. A lifetime of keeping right, on the unexamined theory that one keeps right, has worn a groove I keep sliding back into, and more than once now I have planted myself on the wrong side of a moving staircase and turned into the obstacle everyone else has to flow around. I once answered a letter in this space from a man who took the Pittsburgh Louie — the hometown rule that the left-turner goes first — into a city that had never agreed to it, and collected a chorus of horns for his trouble. I told him, a little smugly, that the rule had made the trip but the common knowledge had not. I am now that man, on an escalator, and the smugness has not aged well. Apparently in Osaka, a couple of hours west, the convention runs the other way — standers on the right, climbers on the left, the same machines read in a mirror2 — which only sharpens the thing I should have packed and didn’t: the rule was never about the left or the right. It was about the agreeing, and I came holding the wrong agreement. (Ed: you’re doing it right now, aren’t you.)
The reason I came
I have come all this way to stand on the correct side of an escalator and to attend the eighteenth meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare, which is, when you scrape the formalism off, the assembled world’s expertise on exactly the question the escalators raise: when a roomful of individuals, each with a position of their own, can be combined into a single coherent collective position — and when the attempt comes apart in your hands. The field has a negative half and a positive half, a body of results about when aggregation fails and a body about when it succeeds, and over the next few weekend editions I am going to set the two side by side, because Tokyo, it turns out, keeps a monument to each. Between them sits the work Maggie is presenting this week, which is about a third thing again: not whether a collective choice coheres, but whether the rule a designer would choose for sorting people lines up with the rule the people being sorted would choose for themselves.
We did not come alone. John Weymark, who once presided over this society, is here; so is Bettina Klaus; so is our Emory colleague Hun Chung, whose work on the social contract is, now that I set it next to Maggie’s, the oldest version of that alignment question there is — when do the rules a sovereign would pick coincide with the rules the governed would actually consent to. The three of them have proved better than any map at locating dinner in a city where the best room in the building is unmarked, six floors up, and seats eight. Position, again. You cannot read it off the world. Somebody has to know where to stand.
That is enough for a day whose name I cannot independently verify. The bracket starts next time, on the negative side, with a man who proved that three of anything is where the trouble begins — which regular readers will recognize as the standing creed of this blog, and which I did not fully appreciate was a theorem with an owner until I started packing for this trip.
With that, I leave you with this.
Notes
1 The prime meridian runs through Greenwich because a conference in 1884 agreed that it should, not because the planet keeps a seam there. Almost any line of longitude would have served; the one virtue of the chosen line is that enough people chose it. Every clock you have ever trusted is downstream of that vote.
2 The stories Tokyo and Osaka tell about why they stand on the sides they do — a world’s fair, a samurai’s sword arm, a railway’s instruction to commuters — are folklore, and they contradict each other, which is the right amount of evidence for the origin of a rule whose entire content is that everyone follows it.
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