Kichijoji station

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well."

Martin Luther King Jr.


There's a man who sits outside the Park Entrance of kichijoji station.

He wears white gloves and a blue uniform.

He sits still and calm, waiting. I see him at 7.30am when I arrive at the station in the morning. I also see him at 8, 9 10 and even 11 or 12 o'clock at night when I come home. As far as I can work out his job doesn't have a name. That doesn't seem to matter though in the pride, care and dedication he shows to it. Roughly every fifteen to twenty minutes a bus will drive along the single lane road outside the Park Entrance. When one of them does he rises from his chair, takes out a whistle from the left hand pocket of his blue starched uniform and stands in the middle of the road whistling and motioning pedestrians to realise that there is a bus coming down the road and they should move to the side. His movements are sharp, decisive and almost militarily precise. He shows no sign of boredom or tedium. In fact, when the moment he has been waiting for arrives and he moves to take his place in the middle of the road he looks like he owns that road. A conductor of the people.

Japan seems to be made up of millions of other people just like this man.