Reversal

I suppose I should start with a positive story.

This positive story begins with a very negative day. I'm all about that turnaround, though. 逆転.

The other day, I woke up to find that my alarm had not gone off, and that I - luckily, in many ways - had in fact woken up with just enough time to get ready for work. Grabbing my bag in a hurry, I realized it was unzipped and upside down, and my papers fell all over my floor.

Obscenities flew through the air as I quickly shoved them into my bag a second time, leaving my apartment in a huff and hastily walking towards the station. I would have run, but it was way too early for that.

Halfway there, I realized I left my phone in my apartment. Time to double back. At this point I reached what I call "the inconvenience threshold," where you stop getting progressively more upset and are just in awe that so many things are going wrong in a row.

It's a bizarre feeling, I think, because it becomes as interesting as it is frustrating. What will happen next!? The suspense kills you.

It turns out what happened next was that the trains shut down while I was at school due to bad weather. This was followed with the ominous remark from a co-worker that "a few years back, the train flew off the rails and killed some people. It was really terrible."

Damn, that's... a good reason to close the trains, I guess.

Uh-oh, that's my only way home. What do I do now?

"It's ok," says the vice principal. "You can take the bus at 4:30."

So I wait for the bus in the freezing cold, hot coffee in hand, as I didn't bring gloves with me that day.

Hold up. Let me talk about the hot drinks you can get here. From a convenience store or vending machine, you can get drinks labeled as あたたかい, or hot. And they are quite hot. I think that's so cool. We don't have hot drinks in our vending machines!

We do have potato chips and Snickers, though. Maybe that's why we're all so fat, because we chose that over hot drinks.

ANYWAY

I rode the bus, which is pretty expensive, to the nearby station. This station isn't the station I need, however, so I stayed on. The driver motioned for me to come forward.

"You need to get off here," he said. "This bus doesn't go to Akita Station."

WHAT. They told me it did!

So the driver asks me where I'm going. I tell him, and he brings me out to look at the bus timetable, explaning which bus I can take back to the station, and which is faster, and which is cheaper, and so on. Then he motions for me to follow him.

"Here, it will be a while before the bus comes, so you can wait inside my bus, where it's heated."

I followed him back inside, where we shot the breeze for a while. He asked me where I'm from, why I came to Japan, what I do here, how long I've been here, all the usual stuff. 

He had very kind eyes, and what I think was an Akita-ben accent. His eyes stood out to me because they were all I could see behind the surgical masks people wear here when they're sick. He had very prominent crow's feet that formed around his eyes whenever he smiled, which was often. I would put him in his late 50's, probably.

I couldn't understand him perfectly, but he was very accommodating and didn't once get frustrated or even act awkwardly when I couldn't find a word or understand his accent.

Just an overall pleasant person to be around, this random bus driver.

It was a very simple gesture, to show me the bus times and let me wait on that bus. But it was also so different from what you'd experience in the U.S. The driver would tell you to get the hell off the bus, probably, and that would be it. And if you were an immigrant? Man, forget it.

That night I hung out with friends and had a wonderful time. A blast, actually. But that's a story for another time.

Sometimes there is a light at the end of the tunnel. 

Even if it did turn out the trains had actually started running again, and I didn't need to go through the ordeal at all... but I'm kind of glad I did.