Shortly after we moved to the Bay Area in the late spring/early summer of 2012, my husband remarked that he thought it was nice that some people felt free to just sack out on a picnic bench somewhere. It wasn't something that we saw often, but, on occasion, people would sleep in public after a hard day or during lunch. This is the uncommon sort of sleeping in public that I see here in the U.S.
The more common type of "sleep anywhere" in America is homeless people. Sometimes they are stretched out in parks (which also happened in Japan) and sometimes just slumbering in front of the local library or even on a street near a shopping area. More often than not, the vibe from public snoozers is not a happy one.
In Japan, most of the people sleeping in strange places, and the range of areas was far greater than it is here, are clearly employed and homed. The vibe you get is a curious one, perhaps even a little amusing. I miss seeing people sleeping anywhere they're too tired to go on and feeling like it's actually kind of cute rather than sad.
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How fortunate the Japanese people are that they feel secure enough about their world to allow themselves to sleep in many more places/times than Americans do.
ReplyDeleteThere were reports of a few incidents of looting after the earthquake and tsunami 3 years ago. But it was nothing compared to what happened in New Orleans after Katrina, for example. I wonder/worry about what might happen in the Bay Area if/when 'the big one' (earthquake) strikes....shudder, shudder. I hope my concerns turn out to be false.....
Everyone knows about people sleeping on trains in Japan,(my father who lives there used to joke that they must pump sleeping gas into the cars), but I thought it was interesting that they felt safe enough to do that in public.
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