Day in, day out you get on the train at Mukōgaoka-yūen. But only this Friday did I notice the outside sign on the local ‘personal hygiene’ emporium. A store selling shampoos and handsoap, toothpaste and make-up, house-cleaning tackle and medicines. The sign, however, reads WEL PARK. Having consulted the local street directory, I find it belongs to a drug-store chain called Welcia Kanto Company. Even so, the urge is now on me to spiderman up the wall and add what to my own eye is a missing ‘L’. Thoughts of Lshaped rooms flood in, not to say long-ago school geometry lessons and those squares and oblongs measurement exercises.

Rooftop vistas. Setagaya Daita and Soshigaya-Okura. Both have yet more ‘mansions’, moderate high-rises at once shoeboxes and in tiers, and with balconies of reach-out-and-touch train proximity. How do people living inside them manage – passing train noise, the near presence of huge metal transportation within arm's length of where your head may be resting? Then there is the laundry. Pegged and hanging out for immediate passing inspections are shirts, sheets, undies, an array of towels. Rail-track dormitory. Odakyū lifecubicles.

Today I found myself sitting opposite a male passenger, not so much a salaryman as a sports jacket and cords type. I was just about settling in for my vertical read of The Japan Times when, like some junkie readying for his fix, he rolled up his left sleeve and with his right hand reached into bag for…a pair of tweezers. Without a byyour-leave he then started tweezering out hairs from his arm and on it went for some time. Not something to make you feel good about breakfast. And there was a whole other arm to go. But then an unusual bit of drama. An older woman, breaking with all rules of non-interference, gender status, and seated on my side of the carriage, suddenly shouted at him – ‘not here, not here’. Startled he got his tweezers back into the bag, rolled down his sleeve, and virtually jumped out at the next station. Quite a thing.