279. Fifth: You can ride on the rail bike! If you’re over 120cm tall. Which I am! BTW this is not a photo of me. :·)pic.twitter.com/LXz6MSOFjV
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289. In this cool music store, I found a music keyboard that used 14-segment displays! Those were popular on pinball machines, but it was exciting to see them used elsewhere.pic.twitter.com/S9f7AUPoUl
290. (One vending machine also introduced me to this variant of a 7-segment display I haven’t seen before.)pic.twitter.com/tNA5lUrmd1
291. In another mall, after feeling overwhelmed, I sat down to one of the digital pianos, and simply started playing that one Bear McCreary’s sonata I know how to play. No one stopped me.pic.twitter.com/GoRJ1fyrOC
(If you’re interested, I wrote about this sonata a few years ago: https://medium.com/@mwichary/1-110-notes-9972f7779263 ….)
292. This happened more often, different flavours of being lost: in a bookstore where I couldn’t identify one single section; in a giant Shibuya train station, half under construction; in a heavy rush hour traffic where at times I felt I had little control over where I was going.
But at no point I felt unsafe, and those experiences I learned to treasure. Japan seemed like a perfect place to be lost before I went there; now I know it for sure.
(My internal compass is not great, but somehow in Japan I ended up going in the opposite direction than I intended even more often than usual.)pic.twitter.com/eHKZ0x4tci
We’re about to bring this threat to its end. It’s actually funny how it all started, completely unplanned, with this little exchange with my friend @wynlim. The list ended up much longer than I ever expected.pic.twitter.com/XZybBOkWnl
(And if you care, there’s a parallel keyboard-only Japan thread that is still going on… https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/958969046476636160 …)
You probably noticed a lot of patterns. Here’s another one. A lot of my discovery of Japan followed this routine: 1. Discover something amazing. 2. Realize this amazing thing is EVERYWHERE, a baseline. 3. Discover an even more extraordinary version of that thing, in some places.
One thing I didn’t mention much yet that follows that pattern was *people.* Everyone I met in Japan was very polite. But some of those people were incredibly kind.
I know just as I don’t understand “cute,” I don’t really have a strong grasp on the roots of the politeness and kindness. I know that sometimes it’s easy to mistake the latter for the former. I’m pretty sure, however, all of the following fell under the second category.
293. A staff of a small museum working hard to find someone who spoke even a bit of English, just to ask him to walk up to me as I was already halfway through the galleries, and apologize for their museum being so English-unfriendly.
294. After learning that I have to leave before 6am, the hotel staff preparing a breakfast care package just for me.pic.twitter.com/A5FUjhJ5ej
295. A woman in a café bringing me a card with wi-fi details after noticing I tried to use my phone.pic.twitter.com/3Hw5DpOxmm
296. A train station clerk going above and beyond to annotate my first-ever Shinkansen tickets to make sure I understood them.pic.twitter.com/xUUV6f5FR6
297. The cab driver studying some English while at the traffic stop, just so he could tell me that I need to go straight after I leave.pic.twitter.com/qBO9slrdkg
298. And then this, possibly my favourite moment in a trip filled with many wonderful moments.
I’m at a busy Shinjuku train station, trying to catch a train. I have Google Maps and all the tech but the station is so busy, and the trains run so often, that the moment I figure one train out, it’s already gone – and another train, on a faraway platform, takes its place.
After some 15 minutes of me trying to figure stuff out, I’m approached by a young girl who, in rudimentary English, asks me whether I need help. I rarely say yes when someone asks me that – but in that moment, I’m ready to say yes.
She asks me what I’m trying to, and then does this amazing dance on her phone: she switches between some sort of a local transit app, trying to figure out which train I should be taking…
…and a Japanese/English translation app, where using the amazing 10-key swiping system, she blazes through Japanese words to have the app spit out their English equivalents.
At some point, the girl indicates that the next train is two minutes away, and then punches something into the translation app. “Guides you” comes out. I nod.
The next minute sees us running through the rush hour traffic to another platform. I’m having trouble just following my guide. Eventually we arrive, and she points up to the staircase that leads directly to my train. But her other hand, the one holding her phone, is raised too.
On the screen, there are a few Kanji characters she thought of typing in during the brief moment we were navigating the tough crowds of what Guinness recognizes as world’s busiest transport hub. And below, the translation: “A pleasant journey.”
299. These two weeks in Japan made me wide-eyed, and happy, and amazed, and lost, and overwhelmed. But one thing that surprised me most: it also made me *kinder*.
At some point, I started going above and beyond to come back and say “thank you,” or to fix the shoes facing the wrong way, or to do whatever little I could to make things better in this culture I still understand so poorly.
Thank you to all for joining me in this big experiment. I loved your comments, and questions, and suggestions. Twitter didn’t make it easy for either of us, but we persevered!
If you’ve read this far, your goal is to take one of the above things, and bring it into your world. I know I’ll try.
But everything good needs to come to an end. I’m writing this, jetlagged, back at my San Francisco desk. It might be a trip that will change my life; the possibility of me moving to Japan is now bigger than zero. I don’t know how much bigger. I guess we’ll find out.
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