Surechigai sociality: location-aware technology on the Yamanote line

Abstract

Every day on Tokyo's Yamanote line, over a million people come face to face. For some, this can be a source of anxiety and discomfort, because they are expected to obey the social etiquette of maintaining one's distance from strangers, despite the train cars being filled beyond capacity. To make the train ride bearable, passengers have adopted a wide range of practices aimed at creating and maintaining personal space, and these practices increasingly involve the use of technology. This article focuses on surechigai tsūshin, a location-aware technology installed in Nintendo's portable gaming devices, which allows users to engage in quasi-anonymous encounters with digital strangers while ‘passing by’ on the street or on the train. Such technologies and encounters show how train cars serve as spaces where estrangement is negotiated and mediated in Japan today. Surechigai tsūshin offers a means to control how one comes to know others, acting as a digitized form of civil inattention. The sociality of surechigai is maintained as smooth ‘passing by’ among strangers who are virtually and actually co-present, familiar and distant faces on the train. The volume of human traffic on the Yamanote line compounds the social effects of surechigai tsūshin, showing how a variety of technologies articulate with one another to create distinct forms of sociality. In this sense, the significance of the Yamanote line rests not only in its characteristic ‘intimate alienation’ (Fujii 1999), but also in the sociocultural negotiation of technologies that mediate experience on the urban railway.