It isn't just in Japan. I see this here in a medium size Canadian city, almost daily.I have had these dullards almost walk into me on the sidewalk- have witnessed as these fools walk into things (tree and post) and had one texting idiot riding her bicycle straight towards my vehicle, while I was driving, in a parking lot!!!Recently in BC a young gal lost her life, walking on the train tracks, texting and listening to musicWho the hell even does that??!! It's tragic. Completely preventable. Her parents are heartbroken.
Darrell Phillips, Tiffany's father, had a message for other kids, according to CBC News.
"Take your headphones out of your ears. Don't walk the tracks. Put [only] one headphone in," he said. "My daughter died because of this. So please... you do not want to do this to your parents."
What I have to say on the subject may be unkind. But, here it is. Straight up!If you are so foolish, so stupid, to actually be unaware of your surroundings..... anything that happens to you it is completely your own fault. * You will be predator for prey. *Victims for criminals. *You won't even have provided yourself the second or two utterly necessary for survival * In the survival of the fittest category...... You're a fail*You are the ultimate in idiocracy. Put your phone away. Stop texting. Get those buds out of your ears. Pay Attention. The life you save can be your own. If you can't make that choice for yourself, one that is actually in your own best interest- Seek help. Help, that is desperately needed.The growing ranks of these cellphone addicts are turning cities like Tokyo, London, New York and Hong Kong into increasingly hazardous hotspots, where zombified shoppers appear to be part of vast games of human pinball.
"Hey, watch it!" barks a middle-aged salaryman as a hipster typing on his smartphone slams into him during one recent Friday evening crush hour."Incidents involving people walking or on bicycles account for 41 percent of phone-related accidents," Tetsuya Yamamoto, a senior official at Tokyo Fire Department's disaster prevention and safety section, told AFP. "If people continue walking around looking at their phones, I think we could see more accidents happening."
A pedestrian using his smartphone on a street in Tokyo, November 3, 2014.
It goes beyond being an innocuous inconvenience where both people apologise before continuing on their merry way.Tokyo Fire Department, which runs the ambulance service in the megalopolis, says that in the four years to 2013, 122 people had to be rushed to hospital after accidents caused by pedestrians using cellphones. As well as the vaguely comedic incidents of businessmen smacking into lamp-posts or tripping over dogs, this total also included a middle-aged man who died after straying onto a railway crossing while looking at his phone.
- Tunnel vision -
More than half of Japanese now own a smartphone and the proportion is rising fast, including children who customarily walk to and from school.
Pedestrians use their smartphones on a street in Tokyo, November 3, 2014.
Research by Japanese mobile giant NTT Docomo estimates a pedestrian's average field of vision while staring down at a smartphone is just five percent of what our eyes take in normally.
95 percent of your field of vision- reduced. Does that make sense to you?
"Children wouldn't be safe in that situation," said Hiroshi Suzuki, manager of corporate social responsibility at the company. "It's dangerous and it's our job to make sure it doesn't actually happen." The company ran a computer simulation of what could occur in Shibuya if everyone crossing the intersection was looking at their smartphones. The results, based on a fairly average 1,500 people swarming over the road at any one time, were alarming: 446 collisions, 103 knockdowns and 21 dropped phones. Only around a third get to the other side without incident.
Japanese media reported that around half of the 56 bodies recovered from the peak of a volcano after a recent eruption were found clutching mobile phones with photos of the deadly lava and ash on them.
Apparently, they had thought it important to be able to show their social media friends what was happening than to try to save themselves.
Hey cool, look it's lava and ash- Let's get an image and post it on facebook- Duh! Unbelievable!
Phone fidgeters dawdling along at snail's pace, forcing cyclists and pram-pushing mums to swerve out of the way have become such an irritant in Tokyo that public notices have started to appear warning offenders to expect "icy stares", appealing to the Japanese sense of social harmony -- assuming people look up from their phones in the first place.
In China, an amusement park in the southwestern megacity of Chongqing has divided a pavement within its grounds into two lanes -- one signposted "No mobile phones" and the other "Mobile phone use permitted but all consequences are your responsibility."
Recorded announcements on Hong Kong's subway network warn passengers in Cantonese, Mandarin and English that they are about to step onto an escalator.
WTF? Shouldn't you know your about to step onto an escalator?