Essay

Being late

By Tan Ying Zhen

"See you at the train station at 15:02," I said to a Singaporean friend who was visiting me in Kyoto.

She laughed. "15:02? Just say three or three-fifteen!"

I smiled sheepishly. I had gotten used to being specific, right down to the last minute, about what time to meet. Besides, just like how trains usually arrive on the dot in Japan, my Japanese friends are seldom late.

In Singapore, it is common to be five or even 15 minutes late for informal appointments. Also, we usually round off the meeting time to the nearest 15 minutes. If I had said, "Let's meet at 15:02," or some other seemingly random time, my friends would have thought I was trying to be funny.

I suppose one reason for the difference is that trains (and to a lesser extent, buses) run like clockwork in Japan. If your train is scheduled to arrive at 15:02 and there is little reason to believe it will be late, it's natural to be specific about the meeting time.

In Singapore, the subway, which we call the Mass Rapid Transit, does not make public its time schedule. The frequency depends on the subway line, as well as the time of the day. It could be as frequent as two minutes, or sadly, eight minutes or more. Buses are even more unpredictable than trains. Sometimes, three buses plying the same route may arrive at once, after a 30-minute bus drought.

Since it is hard to tell what time the train or bus will come — and who knows how many over-crowded trains or buses will pass by before you can squeeze yourself into one — we don't expect our friends to turn up exactly on time.

I complained about the sorry state of Singapore's public transport to a Japanese friend once. He'd lived in Singapore for several years before moving back to Japan, and I thought he'd agree with me. To my surprise, he chuckled and said, "That's precisely what I liked about Singapore!"

He felt that because trains and buses were not always on time, Singaporeans were thus more laid-back than Japanese.

"It's very stressful to feel like you always have to be on time!" he said.

Then again, the definition of "on time" differs from culture to culture. In Japan, being on time may mean arriving five minutes before the scheduled time. In Singapore, you are "on time" as long as you are not more than 10 minutes late. To an American friend of mine, being "on time" for a party means being at least 10 minutes late.

When I was in junior college (the equivalent of high school in Japan), a teacher had chided my class for our "rubber-band time" when we were late for her lessons. I now realize how apt her description is.

Time is a rubber band that we stretch to various lengths. The question is, how taut do you want it to be?

遅刻

時刻表通りに電車が到着する日本に住むようになって、筆者の時間の感覚が変わったという。シンガポールの地下鉄やバスは、そもそも時刻表がなく、待ち合わせの時間設定もアバウトだ。

The Japan Times ST: May 10, 2013