マナー

Japanese are famous for their マナー (manners).
Even big cities in Japan like Tokyo and Osaka have less crime and more general politeness than other large metropolises in the world.

There is crime and there rude people in Japan…but considerably less than in cities overseas.

The high level of politeness in Japan means that the bad manners that most commonly encounter here are things like smoking or eating while walking, putting make-up on while riding the train, music turned up too loud on a Walkman®, not giving up a seat on a train or bus to the elderly, and using cell-phones near the silver seats on the train (where they’re supposed to be turned off).

So, fairly recently, both the Tokyo Metro Subway company and Japan Tobacco (JT) each started a series of good manners posters. (Japan Tobacco‘s posters were originally only aimed at smokers to reiterate good smoking manners…but have grown to include general good manners).

Both the subway and JT‘s posters are written in 日本語 (Japanese) and English. So I like to read them, not so much for their intentionally humorous writing style…but to study the 日本語 (Japanese).

Here are a few of JT‘s posters:

The Tokyo Metro‘s posters have a 「〇〇でやろう。」 (“Please do it at…”) theme, with a clearer explanation at the bottom. For example, one shows a man diving through the subway car’s closing doors and it says 「海でやろう。」 (“Please do it at the beach.”).

There are older manner posters, too. That don’t have any English written on them.

The ones above are the newer ones…but you can still see the original manner posters in Tokyo sometimes.

Here are a couple of the older subway manner posters.

They both basically ask commuters not to bother other commuters with loud music from headphones, sitting improperly (taking up too much space), applying make-up or eating and drinking, or putting their belongings on the seat next to them: