Kuchikomi Aug. 01, 2008 - 06:33AM JST ( 29 )

If rules are irksome to those compelled to obey them, they are more so still to those compelled to enforce them. Take taxi drivers, for instance.

In January, Tokyo cabs went nonsmoking. In June it became mandatory to fasten rear-seat seatbelts. How do drivers handle customers who regard the fare they’re paying as a license to do as they please? Or who are drunk enough to be truculent?

Very gingerly, says Weekly Playboy (Aug 4). “Where I operate, in Asakusa and Kitasenju,” the magazine hears from a 58-year-old driver, “there are a lot of people around who insist on having things their own way. Ask them not to smoke and they’ll light up on purpose. Well, I don’t want trouble, so I tell them once and then let it go. After I’ve dropped them off, I head for the nearest park and wash out the ash tray. Then I run the air conditioner for half an hour. Otherwise the next customer will start grumbling, ‘Somebody’s been smoking in here, it stinks.’ Some actually call the association to complain. Damned nuisance.”

The “association” in question is either the Tokyo Taxi Association or the Tokyo Independent Taxi Association, the capital’s two major umbrella groups that implemented the smoking ban in January. Their move at a stroke made 95% of Tokyo’s 52,000 cabs—and about half Japan’s 270,000—non-smoking.

This is the latest fruit of the 2003 national Health Promotion Law, which seeks among other things to protect innocent lungs from the hazards of second-hand smoke. Like anything else, it has effects beyond its intended consequences.

“I’ve lost a lot of my long-distance clients,” a 65-year-old independent driver tells Weekly Playboy. “If they have to sit there for over an hour without smoking, they’ll find another way to get where they’re going.”

Bucking the trend for that very reason is the independent Anzen taxi group. “A taxi is a private service,” explains a 55-year-old Anzen driver. “There are no fellow passengers to annoy. If they want to smoke, they can smoke. If they want to eat, they can eat. That’s why they’re willing to pay the high fares. A no smoking regulation is not service.”

The new seatbelt law places additional strain on drivers. “Some passengers cooperate, some don’t,” shrugs one 58-year-old driver. The drunks, predictably, are especially obnoxious. “I’m a paying customer, don’t bug me,” is a typical inebriated response to a driver’s request to buckle up.

Or this: “If they stop us it’s your problem, not mine.” Which, ironically, is true; the driver is legally responsible for what goes on in his or her cab. Until October, only warnings will be issued; after that, if the violation occurs on an expressway, actual punishment.

What is clear, Weekly Playboy sums up, is that the era of taxi deregulation is over. Next year the Transport Ministry looks set to introduce legislation limiting the number of taxis. The current over-abundance of them is obvious to most observers, and the incomes of individual drivers have declined in proportion—from a national average of 3.34 million yen a year in 2001 to 3.02 million yen in 2005.

A brake on the current unfettered, hence cutthroat, competition sounds like good news, but the drivers the magazine speaks to seem curiously unimpressed.

“What’s the use at this point?” grumbles one 48-year-old. “The number of taxis out there is already ridiculous—and how much has that cost me? Until three years ago, I was living in a 90,000 yen -a-month apartment; now I live in 40,000 yen-a-month dive. Doesn’t even have a bath. Lucky there’s a bath at our dispatch office. There’s at least that consolation.”