This was published 6 years ago
Japanese railway company offers abject apology after train leaves station 20 seconds early
By Motoko Rich and Makiko Inoue
Tokyo: It may have been the most profusely regretted 20 seconds in history.
Living up to Japan's reputation for being precise as well as contrite, a train company in Tokyo delivered a formal apology on Tuesday because one of its trains left a station just 20 seconds early.
In a country where conductors beg forgiveness when a train is even a minute late, the Metropolitan Intercity Railway Co posted an apology on its website for "the severe inconvenience imposed upon our customers" when the No. 5255 Tsukuba Express train left Minami-Nagareyama station in Chiba, a suburban prefecture east of Tokyo, at 9.44:20am, instead of 9.44:40am as scheduled.
Too fast: A train company in Tokyo delivered a formal apology because one of its trains left a station just 20 seconds early.Credit: Bloomberg
According to the statement, the train arrived at Minami-Nagareyama on time, at precisely 9.43:40am. But when it came time to leave, the over-eager crew closed the doors prematurely and pulled out of the station ahead of schedule.
According to Metropolitan Intercity, no passengers missed the train nor complained about the jump-start.
The effusive apology was in keeping with a culture in which an ice-cream company ran a television advertisement to express regret for raising the price of an ice-cream bar by 10 yen (11¢) last spring.
As foreign media began to cover the news on Thursday, observers abroad expressed envy on Twitter at the trainspotting exactitude.
The Japanese were bemused by the foreign fascination.
"People overseas are half amazed and praised Japan but even Japanese would laugh at this," a user with the handle @gaishi_black wrote on Twitter.
According to an article this month on the Gendai Business website, Tsukuba Express, which carries 130 million passengers a year, markets its "safety and high speed".
The article listed what it described as "concerning" incidents from earlier in the year, including two cases in which trains stopped in the wrong position and an episode in which customers were stuck in elevators at a station for 30 minutes.
Thursday's microscopically early train passed with no apparent impact other than a few laughs on social media, unlike a deadly crash in 2005 that killed more than 100 passengers when the train driver began speeding to make up for a lost 90 seconds in the schedule.
The New York Times