Tourists can be terrifying – I’d have let them into a Tokyo garden for free too
Ifelt a terrible pang reading about the employee of Shinjuku Gyoen garden who was so scared to charge tourists the entry fee that he lost the attraction about $220,000. It sounds a rather comical situation, but having done that sort of job myself, I recognised the anxiety and helplessness this man might have experienced. I worked and volunteered in museums for over a decade before becoming a writer, and for the most part it was as gentle, hushed and dusty as I could have desired – staff ferociously committed to their budget constrained cause, dim rooms playing quiet, amiable host to a trove of historical wonders – with the public-facing elements no less pleasurable than any other. Front-of-house in a small museum is nice: you lead tours, run activities and staff the front desk, all the while meeting people who have sought the place out specially, who arrive excited and leave enthused. Those experiences expanded my understanding of the place I worked. Each good day made me feel interested all over again, and part of something precious.
On the other hand, front-of-house at the major London museum I worked at was the most fraught and febrile environment I’ve ever encountered. The story will be the same at Shinjuku Gyoen garden and any other major tourist attraction. Tens of thousands of visitors passed through every day, each gallery one great impatient jostle, an every-man-for-himself beeline to see and do, to tick these once-in-a-lifetime sights off the bucket list whether or not they enjoyed the experience. People changed their babies’ nappies on the plinths of statues, unpacked their sandwiches on sarcophagi, stood back as their children puked pure chocolate at the foot of the Rosetta Stone. And yes, I was frightened of them, because they were often really horrible. “I pay my taxes,” the nappy-changer told me. “This is my stuff. A British museum. I can do what I like.”
Anybody who works in a customer facing position will probably agree that as soon as you put on a lanyard and a standard-issue blue shirt, you become subhuman. A uniform is fair game for abuse and aggression. People are swift to scorn you and slow to conceal it, because you are not human like they are: you are a service, and when it isn’t the service they envisioned, they yell. I once ruined a man’s day by explaining that the galleries he so vividly recalled were not in our museum but the Louvre. Boy, did he yell. Every time I asked a visitor not to touch, not to take photos, my heart pounded; every time a gallery was closed for refurbishment, or an object had gone on loan, or a special exhibition had ended, it was my fault, another chipping-away at my sense of self. I felt my job wasn’t to assist people but to thwart them, so you can imagine how grateful I was that at least there was no entry fee. That would have been an affront too far. If I was the man at Shinjuku, on a bad day I’d have waved people through the turnstile too, just to feel a bit less like dirt. No question.
Of course, both sides of the interaction are laden with stress and fear. Being a tourist is not relaxing: a nice day at the museum actually involves navigating baffling transport systems, queuing for bag checks, fumbling through your phrasebook hot faced with shame. You feel anxious and stupid as a tourist; making someone else feel anxious and stupid is a way of clawing back a bit of your own authority. In this country, there is the additional problem that front-of-house services are increasingly outsourced due to funding cuts. They may provide the only human point of contact with the museum, but agency staff are also discrete from it, undertrained, underpaid and utterly undervalued. They’re tired and defensive and impatient, and sometimes they can’t help when they really should be able to. It’s not unreasonable that this frustrates visitors.
Still, there’s a lot to be said for kindness. I will not forget the naked terror on the face of the man whose toddler wandered off in a crowd, or the knuckle-whitening clutch of that toddler’s hand in mine when I at last located him (you aren’t meant to touch lost children, but this kid was not letting go). My blue shirt and lanyard and radio made me less human, but they also made me part of the machinery of security and order. It was safe to rage at me. I could fix things. Seeing the tetchy dad’s face crumple into relief was an important reminder that we are all scared, we are all stressed, we all express it badly. If we were willing to recognise that about one another, or even ourselves, the world would be an infinitely nicer place.