Cracking down on drinking and driving is a priority for police in Hawai‘i, as it is everywhere else. But drinking and a different kind of commuting is an issue in Japan, and that’s led one company to make some changes. HPR’s Bill Dorman has more in today’s Asia Minute.
It’s not as pretty as cherry blossoms or as famous as Mount Fuji, but the drunk salaryman is a familiar sight to many visitors to Japan.
It’s a serious issue.
Japan’s ministry of transport says every year, about 3-thousand people tumble onto train tracks in the country….and some 60% of them are drunk. Many are white collar workers returning from drinking after office hours.
West Japan Railways has come up with an experiment to combat the safety issue—at least when it comes to the train tracks. The company is installing about four-dozen closed circuit video cameras at a single train station in the city of Osaka. The cameras are designed to detect odd movements—staggering… or unsteady walking…even passengers sitting on a bench for an unusually long period of time…they will set off an alarm.
A different project undertaken by the advertising firm Ogilvy and Mather and Japanese bar chain Yaocho is aimed at shaming some of those drunk salarymen. It’s a campaign of public service announcements. Teams put down white tape around passed-out salarymen and frame them in a picture—encouraging passersby to take photos and post them on social media….with the hashtag “nomi sugi”—or “too drunk.”
https://vimeo.com/134911796">Yacho Bar Group: Sleeping Drunk Billboard from https://vimeo.com/ogilvyasia">Ogilvy Asia on Vimeo.
