Chapter 8: Ii Nihonjin
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J3J Episode 10: Winter in Tokyo >>
東京都 目黒区駒場 ヤニの家 Home, Komaba, Tokyo Fri 13 Oct 2000 20:19
I got up at 6:15 and embarked on my carefully plotted route to the Tsuruse service area. Bus to Hirosaki, train to Hiraka, bus to Fukiage, get off, turn left, 500 meters... and I realized the bus just drove past me (it wasn't supposed to), the road was about to go under the expressway (it should have been to the right) and the Takashiro building was nowhere in sight (it was supposed to be here). I scaled the highway embankment and peeked, but the SA was nowhere in sight... unless it was behind those tall fences several km to the north. Oops.
I asked a tittering group of girls in a van for direction and they offered to give me a lift, which they did, but to the Hirosaki-Owani IC instead of the Tsuruse SA. A raincloud was approaching rapidly but I had little choice, so I stuck it out and watched cars trundle past for 20 minutes, most heading in the wrong direction. But then a squeaky-clean Subaru blasting out J-Pop stopped and the young girl driving it waved me in. Miharu works as a car saleswoman, the car was from the shop and she was driving it to Morioka for a reason that I didn't quite grasp due to the background music.
After about 120 km and lots of worrying about my safety (I thought it was cute little female drivers who were supposed to worry about the intentions of ruff'n'tuff 2-meter foreigners?), she dropped me off at the last large SA before Morioka. It was 11 AM so I decided to keep going, and I barely had time to regret not asking for her phone number before the next car pulled up.
"Sure, I'll take you to Sendai, but in fact I'm going towards Yokohama", said Nakahara-san, a 40-something family man doing his little 900-kilometer commute from Shimokita to Yokohama to work as a construction worker. Evidently Shimokita has plenty of jobs, but they all pay poorly and his kids are studying in (ruinously expensive) private colleges, so the only way he can make ends meet is by working in Tokyo, seeing his family only a few times a year. Two more years to go and then he can stop doing this, but until then... the route was obviously familiar and he flew along it at 130 km/h, 50 km above the posted (if uniformly ignored) speed limit. And of course he refused to allow me to pay for my lunch.
Another 450 km sliced off, he dropped me off some 40 km before the end of the expressway and headed to Yokohama along a ring road, avoiding the congestion of the center. I ate a quick bowl of fried noodles ("Wow, your Japanese is good!", complimented the noodle seller girl, "my back was turned and I thought you were Japanese yourself!") and then caught the very last ride of the trip with a very affable pair of semiconductor company workers, one a Korean who directed the conversation and looked but didn't act like the devout churchgoer he was, and the driver a chain-smoking, somewhat unkempt-looking fellow with an explosive laugh and a wicked sense of humor.
Korean guy: So what do you think about Japanese people?
Yours truly: Oh, they're very kind...
Japanese guy: Damn straight! And if you say otherwise we'll throw you out!
Korean guy: Nonono, he would throw you out, but I would take you
back in. I'm Korean, remember?
Tokyo rush hour being what it is, the last 40 km took almost long as the previous 400, but thanks to their Laurel-and-Hardy act, constantly poking fun at each other and everything, it didn't seem long at all. We drove across Tokyo Bay and even went through Haneda, the airport I left from, and I thought, "Drat. I should have asked them to keep that camping gas can after all."
Eventually, almost too soon, I was dropped off at Kamata station. It was about 6 PM: it took me twelve hours to cover the 600 km from Hirosaki to Tokyo, half the length of Japan. For free. I did the train shuffle, devoured a Matsuya gyuumeshi oomori along the way, and crashed at home to find that my three weeks' mail contained absolutely nothing of importance, and that my refrigerator had entirely failed to grow expansionist colonies of sentient slime mold. And now, here I sit on my bed, thinking... damn! It's OVER!