Subway Semiotics

I have (sadly) never been to Japan, but I find that I am alternately captivated and confused by their public signage. Their subway signs in particular seem to have piqued the interest of not only me but a great many other bloggers. This may be because these signs aren't simply pointing to the nearest exit or instructing you not to litter; they are attempting to provide some behavioral guidelines . . . a framework for acceptable and unacceptable subway etiquette. Signs like these can't help but speak volumes (in just a few words) about both a culture and a communication style that is very different from our own.

As a preamble, I found these on photographer Robert Francis' photostream entitled signs.  Here, we have an unfortunate critter whose porcine posterior has been set ablaze by a careless subway rider's cigarette:

 

Francis speculates that this may serve as a reminder to smokers that there are children around whose height could put them well within the trajectory of flying cigarette ash/embers/butts.

From the same photostream, we also have this poor fellow:

This sign seems to be warning the viewer not to run into closed train doors. I don't know, but I think I probably didn't need a sign to help me avoid this situation. None-the-less, I love the cartoon.

Further research reveals that there is a whole series of Japanese subway posters having to do with rider etiquette that revolves around different themes, many of which can be discovered at inventorspot.com. In 2009, the first posters from the "Please Do It" campaign --as in Please do that somewhere else and not here on a crowded train car--began appearing in stations and on trains. These were created by graphic artist Bunpei Yorifuji, and have been re-posted, re-captioned, and re-interpreted (sometimes quite profanely) a hundred times over. Most of the depicted parables of inconsiderate behavior I encountered make sense, although some of them were a little esoteric.

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Personally, I'm impressed by the thoroughness of this person's transformation on a bumpy public train. She must have a steady hand. I must say, of all the behaviors I've seen people exhibit on public transit in Baltimore, applying make-up seems awfully inoffensive to me. You go ahead and pile that pancake on, girl.

On the eve of the iPhone5, here's another one that seems unlikely to resonate with Americans:

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Clearly, the artist doesn't realize she has to do it on the subway; It's illegal to cry on the phone with your jerk boyfriend while driving a car. Where else is she going to do it?

Seriously though, the messages begin to get a little bizarre after a certain point. For example, I love vacationing on the coast, but I have never made whatever is going on here a part of my itinerary:

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Um, what?

And something seems lost in the translation here, too....

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What exactly is happening here? Is he practicing his golf swing? Summoning a hailstorm? Preparing for the imminent zombie onslaught? No idea, but apparently Japanese custom dictates he'd better take it out front before he breaks something.

I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from these. It's true that part of the content is in a language I don't understand, but these posters are relying primarily on their visual weight to convey their message. It seems as though, even with the aid of English captions, the tone of a visually communicated statement is culturally loaded . . . sometimes to the point of being utterly incomprehensible. There are many more posters from this series to see; just do a Google image search, but beware of imposters (anything pornographic, scatological,  or featuring a bong is unlikely to be the work of Yorifuji). I would love to hear other peoples impressions of these....