You Can’t Spell Tokyo Without K.O.: A photo-essay dissecting the Japanese epidemic of passing out in public

Nicholas Floyd

Feb 2016 · Nicholas Floyd

About this ebook

Every day, all across the city of Tokyo, a curious phenomenon unfolds: scores of blue- and white-collar citizens end up passed out — sometimes in spectacular fashion and mind-boggling positions — on the streets, on trains, in restaurants, in bushes, or anywhere else imaginable. Come nightfall, one might stumble upon a well-to-do Japanese salaryman lying crumpled and snoozing facedown on the sidewalk, apparently walloped by a haymaker of fatigue that sent him crashing down for the count. These brutal knockout punches sometimes involve intoxication, but alcohol alone fails to explain this widespread yet unintuitive phenomenon: making a public spectacle of oneself in a society like Japan’s, where conformity and shame heavily regulate behavior.

Rife with fascinating insights into Japanese culture, You Can’t Spell Tokyo Without K.O. embarks on an eye-opening journey where social commentary and candid street photography explore the various societal factors — some enviable, some alarming — that contribute to this epidemic of passing out in public.

About the author

Nicholas Floyd was born in the Midwest of the United States of America, where he lived an uneventful two decades until, as a young college student, he received sage advice from a fellow Midwestern native who had fled to California and who insisted that Nicholas likewise “get the hell outta the Midwest”. Nicholas overshot California and the entire Pacific Ocean, landing in Japan, where he lived on and off for five years collectively. During that time, he achieved fluency in Japanese thanks to sage advice from a different friend, who had previously lived in Japan and who insisted, “Don’t hang out with other foreigners.”

In the US and Japan, Nicholas worked full-time as a systems administrator, and during his mid-twenties he spent several years traveling the world competing as a nationally ranked video game tournament player, but he ultimately gave up the hobby in pursuit of other interests, such as piano composition and photography.

During his late twenties, he toiled over the inverse correlation of his steadily increasing net worth and his steadily decreasing net happiness, and it became obvious that neither spending forty hours per week in an office nor the corporate world in general tickled his fancy. So at the age of thirty, he left a successful and promising career in IT to pursue a lifelong passion far less lucrative but far more enjoyable: writing.

He is particularly interested in anthropology, human sexuality, healthy living, sustainability and minimalism, studies of consciousness (waking, dreaming, and altered states), the beneficial uses of psychedelics, and drug policy reform.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, as well as a minor in Mathematics, both of which are now collecting dust. He happily resides in a tiny apartment on the island of Oahu.