Death in the subway

摘要

Until last week, Kasumasa Taka-hashi was just another faceless Japanese bureaucrat, the deputy station master at Kasumigaseki subway station in central Tokyo. The blue-suited mandarins of the nation's key ministries who poured from the commuter trains every morning were his customers: Takahashi took their tickets, pointed them up the proper escalators and kept the sprawling station—where three major subway lines converge —so clean that the white gloves he wore on the job were seldom soiled.