Travelling by train turned out to be more lucrative than a visit to a pachinko parlour for some commuters last week, it was revealed yesterday.

Commuters at Hisayaodori, Nagoya “got back 10,000-yen and 5,000-yen bills as change instead of 1,000-yen bills after a station employee mistakenly put the wrong notes in a subway ticket vending machine last Friday.”

Authorities said the station lost about 250,000 yen over three hours and that only one passenger had returned the money, which was when station staff first found out about the mistake.

According to subway officials, an assistant stationmaster, 57, placed 10,000 and 5,000 yen notes in the space for 1,000 notes by mistake. The vending machine cannot detect differences in notes, the officials said.

While some corners of the internet decry as a sign of the times (and presumably the imminent collapse of civilised society) the fact that only passenger returned the money, I have to ask, is it really surprising?

We all know that if you drop your wallet in Japan, you stand a better chance of getting it back than you would in a lot of other countries. But is there really a great well of civic rectitude that’s running dry? A senior Japanese acquaintance of mine remarked that on an individual and personal basis, each person is accountable, and therefore feels pressure to do the right thing. But anonymously and collectively, (and importantly, unaccountably) people are selfish chancers whatever their nationality.

Quick, what’s the expression of the guy in this picture?

Your response–and whether or not you took into account the feelings of the people behind him–may be a reflection of your culture. I wrote earlier about the neurological test that has recently been conducted, testing East Asian and American patients and their ability to make relative and absolute judgments. Here’s another test, utilizing the picture above.

When asked how the foregrounded person — their face manipulated to look happy, angry or sad — appeared to feel, nearly three-quarters of 36 Japanese test subjects said their perception was influenced by the emotions of the background figures.
By contrast, nearly three-quarters of 39 North American participants said the people in the background didn’t affect them at all.
When the researchers tracked the viewers’ eye movements, they found that Japanese gazes flitted quickly to the background, while North Americans fixated on the central subject.

My first reaction was that the guy looked determined, and appeared to have a group of friendly followers. Only later did I think of the picture in terms of happy or sad.

What about you?