It is 6:47pm at the ticket gate and there are eleven grown adults forming a ceremonial scrum directly across the only fucking way in or out, bowing at each other like a flock of geese having a religious experience, and the word they keep braying is otsukaresama. Loosely: "you must be tired." I am now. Profoundly. Because I have been standing behind this human roadblock for four minutes watching a goodbye that requires more choreography than a state funeral, while a queue of two hundred commuters backs up behind me into the concourse like a clot in an artery.

Let me set the bloody scene. A team has finished work. Lovely. Genuinely, well done, off you pop. But they cannot simply leave. No. The departure must be performed. There is the senior who bows shallow because he can. There are the juniors who bow so deep their foreheads nearly clip the IC card readers. There is the round of otsukaresama desu, then otsukaresama deshita, then a second wave because someone arrived late to the bowing, and then a bonus round of head-bobbing as they peel off in different directions, each pair re-bowing on the way out like a fucking save point in a video game.

And where, of all the square metres available in a Japanese train station, have these absolute clowns chosen to stage this? Not the wide-open plaza six feet to the left. Not the side. No. Smack in the dead centre of the gate. The single chokepoint. The one rectangle of floor through which every single human being in this station must pass. It is a masterclass in spatial cluelessness. It is kuuki wo yomu, reading the air, inverted into a black hole that no air can escape.

Why the otsukaresama bow always happens in the worst possible spot

Here is the thing that makes me want to put my forehead through the laminated route map. This is a culture that has elevated not inconveniencing others to a national religion. Meiwaku. Don't be a nuisance. Don't talk on the train. Don't eat while walking. Don't let your wheelie suitcase clip a stranger or you'll be apologising until you're forty-one fucking years old. The whole edifice of public politeness is built on the sacred principle of getting out of everyone's way.

And then eleven of them will, without a flicker of irony, build a bowing pyramid in the one spot guaranteed to inconvenience the maximum number of human beings physically possible. For fuck's sake. The cognitive dissonance is so vast it has its own weather. They will mutter sumimasen if their bag brushes your sleeve, then erect a thirty-minute gratitude ceremony across a doorway that two hundred people need, and feel, I promise you, like the most considerate tossers in the prefecture.

Because the ritual outranks the reality. That's the rot at the centre of it. The form of politeness, the deep bow, the correct verb tense, the deshita versus the desu, matters more than the actual fucking outcome, which is a furious foreigner and a hundred and ninety-nine furious locals all doing the internal scream while pretending everything is fine. Nobody will say a word. Nobody will sigh too loud. That would be meiwaku. So we all stand there, a silent congregation of the inconvenienced, watching the bowing wankers complete their liturgy.

The bow is for them, never for you

Understand what you are actually watching. This is not gratitude. This is rank performance, a public broadcast of I am a diligent and respectful employee, aimed at the senior in the group and absolutely nobody else. You, the commuter trying to get to your bloody train, are scenery. You are the unpaid extra in their workplace harmony pageant. Your evening is the price of their tatemae.

And the genius of it, the truly maddening genius, is that you cannot get angry. There is no villain. Everyone is being lovely. That is the trap. It's the most polite mugging you'll ever experience.

So I do what I always do. I do not recommend it. But since I have places to be, I cut through their bowing ceremony like a knife through butter, without a single bit of remorse. Take that daft shit somewhere else.