From The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (Paul Theroux, 1975)
From Ch23
The police in Singapore are assigned to the oddest tasks; the courts are filled with the unlikeliest criminals. In what other country on earth would one see such items in the paper?
- Eleven contractors, three householders and a petrol-kiosk proprietor, were fined a total of $ 6,035 yesterday for breeding mosquitoes.
- Tan Teck Sen, 20, unemployed, was fined $ 20 for shouting in the lobby of the Cockpit Hotel yesterday.
- Four people were fined $ 750 yesterday under the Destruction of Disease-Bearing Insects Act for allowing insects to breed.
- Sulaimen Mohammed was fined $ 30 yesterday for throwing a piece of paper into a drain at the 15 ½ mile, Woodlands Road.
Seven or eight years is not an uncommon sentence for a political offence, and criminal offences usually include a whipping. An alien can be deported for having long hair, and anyone can be fined up to $ 500 for spitting or throwing paper on the ground. Essentially, these laws are passed so that foreign tourists will come to Singapore and, if the news gets out that Singapore is clean and well disciplined, then Americans will want to set up factories and employ the nonstriking Singaporeans. The government emphasizes control, but in such a small place control is not hard to achieve.
Here is a society where newspapers are censored and no criticism of the government is tolerated; where television is a bland confection of quiz shows, American and British situation comedies, and patriotic programmes; where mail is tampered with and banks are forced to disclose the private accounts of their clients. It is a society where there is literally no privacy and where the government is in complete control. This is the Singaporeans’ idea of technological advance:
How would you like to live in a futuristic Singapore where mail and newspapers arrive at your home electronically by facsimile ‘print-out’? Sounds like science fiction, but to the Acting General Manager of the Singapore Telephone Board, Mr Frank Loh, they could ‘become reality before long’. He said, ‘Developments in telecommunications have already done much to change the pattern of our lives. Concepts such as the “wired city” in which a single cable to each home or office would handle all communication needs could soon be put into practice.’ Mr Loh, who was speaking on ‘Telephone Communication’ at the convention of the Singapore-Malaysia Institutes of Engineers, gave more details of such exciting developments which the future holds. ‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘at your home communication centre, both mail and newspapers might arrive electronically delivered by facsimile “print-out”.’ (Straits Times, 20 November 1973)
It struck me as a kind of technology that reduced freedom, and in a society that was basically an assembly plant for Western business interests, depending on the goodwill of washerwomen and the cowardice of students, this technology was useful for all sorts of programmes and campaigns. In a ‘wired city’ you wouldn’t need wall space for SINAGAPORE WANTS SMALL FAMILIES and PUT YOUR HEART INTO SPORTS and REPORT ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS: you would simply stuff it into the wire and send it into every home.
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from Ch26
Two ladies, chatting softly, advanced upon me. The dog paused, rocked back and shat; one lady flourished a paper she had held in readiness, and, still chatting to her friend, delicately scooped up the dog shit and deposited it in a near-by barrel.
I hadn’t seen the barrel until she used it: Tokyo’s order is apparent only up close–from a distance it is a jumble, but the jumble must be studied for the plan to emerge. Then you see the sliding doors, the neatly hidden lights in the wall and under the table connected to barely visible switches marked BRIGHT and DUSKY, the tables and waiters and spigots that materialize from the wall, the machines in the subway that sell you a ticket and then punch it, the disappearing chairs, and the silent trains you board with the help of the disembodied arm of a man who is hired to push people aboard. At seven o’clock in the evening when the stores close, two girls in uniform appear at the door; they bow, say ‘Thank you’ and ‘Come again’ to each customer, and they are back in the morning. At the enormous Isetan Department Store in Shinjuku, the groups of employees standing by display counters say, ‘Good morning’ to the first customers, making them feel like stock-holders. Everything works: the place spins with polite invention.
On a department-store wall there are forty-eight colour televisions, an impressive display of electronics, and, though even forty-eight images of a little Japanese politician giving a speech in living colour do not make him Winston Churchill, the array reveals the Japanese taste for gadgetry. There must be something in the Japanese character that saves them from the despair Americans feel in similar throes of consuming. The American, gorging himself on merchandise, develops a sense of guilty self-consciousness; if the Japanese have these doubts they do not show them. Perhaps hesitation is not part of the national character, or perhaps the ones who hesitate are trampled by the crowds of shoppers–that natural selection that capitalist society practises against the reflective. The strong impression I had was of a people who acted together because of a preconceived plan: a people programmed. You see them queuing automatically in the subway, naturally forming lines at ticket counters and machines, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the people all have printed circuits. But my assessment changed with time and I began to see people struggling against order in these subway lines: as soon as the train drew in and the doors flashed open, many people who had waited silently for a long time in an orderly line broke ranks and began shoving and flailing their parcels and throwing themselves at the door.
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