It is 6:00am by the Meguro river and there is a wireless the size of a house brick screaming tinny piano at a crescent of pensioners doing synchronised arm windmills. This is rajio taiso, the national morning calisthenics ritual, and I have lived here long enough to know that no amount of therapy will ever get it out of my head. That fucking piano. That relentless, chipper, wartime-adjacent piano, drilling the same routine into the population at dawn like it's 1928 and we're all about to be conscripted.

And it never stops. That's the thing they don't tell you. You think it's a river thing, an old-folks thing, a sweet-little-quirk thing. It is not. It has metastasised. Walk past any building site at half seven and the entire crew is stood in a semicircle in hi-vis, windmilling their arms in unison before they're allowed to touch a single bloody girder. Walk past an office at nine and you can see them through the glass, forty salarymen in white shirts doing the twisty bit, the reach-for-the-sky bit, the little bouncing-on-the-spot bit, faces set in the thousand-yard stare of men who died inside during the Koizumi administration.

For fuck's sake. It's a stretch. It's a fifteen-second stretch you could do in the shower, dressed up as national character.

What rajio taiso is actually for

Let me be clear about what this is, because the tourist board will tell you it's about health and community and I am here to tell you it's about neither. Rajio taiso is not exercise. Nobody has ever gotten fit doing the little windmill. It is a compliance drill. It is the state, via a piano recording from before your grandmother was born, checking that you will still move your body on command, in unison, at an hour chosen specifically to be inconvenient, because a population that will do that will do anything.

And the genius of it, the truly infuriating genius, is that it's been running so long nobody questions it. It's just there, like the fucking cicadas. Some absolute clown in a ministry decided in 1928 that the nation needed synchronised morning movement broadcast by radio, and here we are, ninety-odd years and a couple of world-historical catastrophes later, and the pensioners are still out by the river at six, windmilling, while the office muppets do it through the double glazing at nine like performing seals in a beige aquarium.

You want to know what kuuki wo yomu actually costs? It costs this. It costs a grown man in a hi-vis vest doing bloody arm circles at dawn because to not do them, to just stand there like a normal human being who understands that a stretch is optional, would be to read the air, understand exactly what it was asking of him, and refuse. And nobody refuses. That's not participation. That's a hostage video with better posture.

The tossers who defend it

There is always some knobhead, usually another foreigner three years in and still in the honeymoon, who'll tell you it's lovely, actually, that it builds community, that it's good for the elderly to get out. Do me a favour. The elderly could get out for a walk. A walk is exercise. A walk does not require a wireless the size of a hi-fi belting out martial piano at a volume that has woken every light-sleeping foreigner in a two-hundred-metre radius since the Showa era.

And the office version isn't even for the old dears. That's the bit that gives the game away. Forty perfectly healthy adults in their working prime, stopping the productive day to do a windmill in sync, is not a health intervention. It's a loyalty test performed standing up. It's the company saying move when we say move and everyone saying yes with their whole exhausted body before they've even had their first fucking coffee.

I've watched it through the glass a hundred times now. Forty people, one piano, zero enthusiasm, total compliance. A masterclass in doing something pointless together because stopping would be worse than the pointlessness. Truly the work of a sovereign nation's finest minds.

Anyway. It's 6:00am. The piano's started. Somewhere by the river, a semicircle of pensioners is windmilling into the dawn, and forty salarymen are three hours from doing exactly the same thing. Sod all of it.