Night Train

The very best things happen in Japan when you are waiting for something else to happen.  I suppose that it's really only because so much time in Japan is spent waiting, or maybe it was because in my monolingual foreign-ness, I was so inept at, for example, catching trains on time.  But if I had it all to do over again, I would miss all those trains again because a lot of life happens when you don't know what the hell you're doing.

It was an epic case of missing a train that created the opportunity to meet the group of men who became my best friends for a while.  I decided one Friday night--a very cold night in early January--to take a train to Tokyo after I got off work.  The school I was teaching at had evening lessons, so that meant leaving late.  I guess I assumed, to the extent that I thought of it at all, that trains ran more or less all night.  I remembered reading something in the Lonely Planet guide about a night train, but with my usual fecklessness, I didn't get details or anything.

Unfortunately, I got to the next major town from where I lived (for geography buffs, I lived in Fujinomiya, at the base of Mt. Fuji, and the place where I ran out of train was Numazu, both in Shizuoka prefecture), I discovered that the next train that would get me as far as Tokyo wasn't until morning.

I didn't want to spend my little bit of money on a hotel, and I was trapped in this town where I didn't know anyone.  My Japanese was still below beginner, but I did at least have a phrasebook and dictionary on me. I spent most of the night wandering around watching people.   I was given a CD Walkman with a Dave Matthews band CD in it by a very drunk Australian who thought some Dave Matthews would somehow help me fight off hypothermia.  As the night was winding down and the streets were starting to clear, I settled myself on a bench near the train station to have a long, cold wait with bad music.

I had only been sitting there a few minutes when I spotted a beautiful young man walking down the street opposite where I was sitting.  He was watching me, so I gave him my very biggest and best smile, and he smiled back and our eyes locked.  And finally, the magic of the moment having apparently overcome his initial hesitation to talk to a strange foreigner in the cold, he crossed the street to talk to me.

We had halting conversation for a few minutes, relying heavily on my dictionary, until he understood my situation.  He had been on his way to meet a group of friends, so he called them to tell them where he was, and they all came to where we were sitting.  There were 3 or 4 girls and 7 or 8 men, and they were all very concerned for my well being.

I ended up going back to the apartment of one of the guys and his girlfriend to stay the night.  Then I returned nearly every weekend for over a year to give some of them private English lessons, lessons which always somehow involved alcohol.  As I kept going back, I got to know them pretty well.  They were all in their mid-20s, and they had all gone to high school together.  The men all worked construction, while the women mostly worked at secretarial type jobs.  In truth, I didn't see the women most weekends; usually when we went out drinking, I was the only woman in the group of 4-8 people.  But over the course of this year, these guys taught me a lot of Japanese, a lot about relationships between the sexes in Japan, the etiquette of drinking in a bar with friends, and that you can fish off the pier in Numazu.  They are the reason that one Japanese cop I met told me that my Japanese sounds like a young man's, not appropriate at all for a young woman or an English teacher.  They are the reason that at a certain bar in Numazu, there is a drink named after me (it's a gin, Campari, and tonic concoction).  Ultimately, they are (indirectly) the reason I had the chance to meet my husband.