It's 8:14am at Shinjuku station and there is a man walking directly at me at the speed of continental drift, eyes fused to his phone, mouth slightly open, utterly convinced he is the only conscious entity in a building that processes three and a half million people a day. He is a keitai zombie, and he is going to walk into me, because that is what keitai zombies do. They do not stop. They do not steer. They have surrendered every scrap of spatial awareness they were born with to a six-inch rectangle displaying, as far as I can tell, absolutely fucking nothing of consequence.

Here is the thing that genuinely does my head in. This is a country that has laminated a sign for everything. There is signage instructing you how to hold the handrail. There is a diagram showing you the correct angle at which to queue. The entire national project is kuuki wo yomu, reading the air, sensing the room, never ever being an inconvenience to another living soul. And then rush hour arrives and half the population strolls into a moving river of commuters at the pace of a wounded snail, staring at a mobile game, having decided that reading the air stops the instant the air is between them and a match-three puzzle.

The cognitive dissonance is fucking spectacular. A society that will apologise for existing in your general vicinity, that performs the little seat-shuffle when you sit on a bench, that agonises over whether their umbrella is dripping on your shoe, will then plant themselves dead centre in the Yamanote line transfer corridor and stop. Just stop. To send a text. To four hundred people trying to get to work behind them. Never once does the thought arrive, not even as a rumour: perhaps this is annoying.

Why the keitai zombie is Japan's most protected species

What makes it unbearable is the total immunity. In London a bloke walking into you at a phone-staring crawl gets a "WATCH IT, MATE" and a shoulder, and that’s if the phone doesn’t get nicked! Here, nothing. The collective politeness that governs every other interaction simply evaporates, and everyone else flows around the obstruction like water round a rock, silently, resentfully, saying not one bloody word. The zombie is never corrected. The zombie is never told. So the zombie continues, emboldened, breeding more zombies, an entire generation of tossers who genuinely believe the concourse rearranges itself around their scrolling.

And then, because the universe wants me dead, there are the readers. Actual novels. I have watched, with my own two eyes, a man read a paperback while walking through the ticket gates at Shibuya during evening rush. A book. Both hands. Turning the fucking pages. Moving through a crowd of thousands at the pace of a man being executed, engrossed in chapter nine, utterly serene, while a queue of humanity backs up behind him like a clot. Unreal. Absolutely unreal. Who looked at the single most crowded transit environment on planet Earth and thought, yes, this is where I'll get some reading done? I've seen people descend a staircase this way. A staircase. In heels. For fuck's sake.

The worst part, the bit that curdles it from annoyance into genuine contempt, is that they'd be mortified if you named it. Point out to a keitai zombie that they've been standing in a doorway for ninety seconds watching a livestream while forty people miss their train and they'd be crushed, apologetic, bowing, sumimasen-ing you into next week. The awareness exists. It's just been switched off and pointed at the phone. They are perfectly capable of consideration. They have simply decided that the corridor, the platform, the escalator, and your entire morning are a lower priority than whatever muppet they're following on TikTok.

So I do what the local method demands. I say nothing. I flow around the rock like water. But should they be oncoming; a 100% pure British-made lean shoulder will be delivered.