2002-02-13 - 9:32 p.m.
I will hesitantly say that I like my 2-hour daily commute by bike, train, and foot. The only bad part as far as I’m concerned is getting up so early. But once I’m on the train I don’t mind. I like having the extra time to be awake before starting work. One of the things I didn’t like about the close schools is that I would roll over, look at the alarm clock, and groggily think, “in less than an hour I’ll be standing in front of a class.”
My co-JETs’ major and unanimous complaint about the train is the high school students -- practically an entire school rides the train in the morning and back again in the afternoon. However, they haven’t bothered me yet. One of the advantages of not understanding the language is that I can easily tune it out. This makes riding a train full of yapping teenagers less trying than, say, riding a Metroliner with 3 yuppies talking loudly on their cell phones. Anyway, since I’m the end of the line, they’re only on the train for about half of the time I am, and for the rest of the ride I practically have the whole train to myself. In the mornings, the high school girls gather in cliques throughout the car for their daily makeup routine, which includes every product you could think of, including eyelash curlers and loads of mascara. They roll up their skirts to a very short (and illegal) length, and make a vain attempt at keeping warm by wearing bulky, white knee-high leg-warmers, held up by a special glue made just for that purpose.
The ride home is nice because for the first half hour I have the train to myself to gaze out the window. This is the most rural part of Kimitsu and it is beautiful. Rivers wind through fragile-looking bamboo forests. Traditional scalloped-roofed houses sit amidst rice fields, surrounded by a rumpled line of low mountains. Yards are marked not by fences but by perfectly-trimmed boxy hedges and gnarly ginkgo trees. It looks like picture-postcard rural Japan.
Today I got a ride home from an elementary school, and found myself wishing I was on the train instead. For one thing, on the train I don’t have to try to make (and understand) small talk in Japanese, and for another, forty minutes in a car winding through mountains is a little rougher on the stomach than an hour and a half on the train. The other JETs described the train ride with disdain and dread. “I just try to block it out of my mind until I have to do it,” one of my neighbors said of the commute. But they also warned me about the 40-minute bike ride to my last school, and I ended up liking that as well (perhaps because I not only saw Mt. Fuji on a regular basis but dropped a couple of kilos as well). Don’t get me wrong -- I’m sure I’ll be relieved when I start my final school in May, which is only a few minutes away by bike. But for now I don’t mind spending a few hours a day just looking out the window.
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TWO earthquakes in the past two days, thus upsetting my main source of self-reassurance, “there was an earthquake yesterday, so I don’t have to worry about one today.” Monday morning at about 10 AM I woke up in Tokyo at the end of one. Saori of course didn’t feel it, and thus denied it. But then I talked to Lela and she had felt one at the same time at her house, so it did indeed occur. Then last night I was watching the late news when an earthquake struck. I rushed to my front door, opened it, and stood in the door frame until it was over. Peering outside I could see a woman, far away and down the hill, standing in her door frame as well, silhouetted by her living room light. At least I’m following standard safety procedure. I heard dogs barking all over the neighborhood, and I went back into the living room, where a newscaster was already reporting the quake. There was a map that showed the magnitude over the entire region -- it was between a 3 and a 4 here. I called Saori to see if she had felt it. She said no, but that explained why she looked across her apartment and saw a shoebox move all of a sudden.
