Day 6, In a train

In a Train? Yes, I literally spent the whole day inside a train. You might find it hard to believe, but something actually went wrong with the Japanese railways. As I wrote yesterday, today I had to travel for 7 hours from Sapporo to Morioka, with 3 different trains. The first leg, to Hakodate, went fine. It took about 3.5 hours by limited express and I made my transfer with about 3 minutes left. The next leg would bring me to Hachinohe. Well, I eventually did reach Hachinohe, but at 11 pm, about 7 hours too late.

It all started in Aomori. There our train waited suspiciously long. In Japan that means 1 minute too long. After waiting for about half an hour, we were told to go to the train on the other side of the platform. When I say that ‘we we’re told’, I actually mean that everyone went to the other train, and I just followed. Namely, from the moment things started going wrong, there wouldn’t be a single word of English information for the rest of the day. I speak no Japanese, and I was practically the only foreigner on the train, so this made everything a lot more difficult.

After waiting for about an hour in the next train, something was announced through the intercom. Again I didn’t understand a thing of what was said, but everyone exited the train, and so did I. On the platform people started queuing (Japanese love to queue). After a Japan Rail (JR) employee announced something through his megaphone, the queue started moving. I had managed to discern the word ‘basu’, or bus, in his speech. And indeed, at the station exit lots of busses were waiting and everyone started forming new queues at each bus. For the first time we noticed that it was raining very hard. Later I heard that there was a small typhoon raging in northern Japan, which was probably also the cause for the train problems. The rain didn’t stop some people from filming everything, though.

All this nicely illustrates two typical aspects of Japanese behavior. The first is that everyone always stays calm and polite; nobody cuts the line or starts running, which is what would happen in the Netherlands. The second is that they all naturally expect that the responsible people (Japan Rail in this case) will come up with a solution. Then it is just a matter of waiting for the solution to arrive, even if it takes a several hours. Also you don’t see people openly complaining. Maybe on the inside they are furious, or my lack of Japanese language skills hides it, but there is no swearing or such. Actually, none of the people I spoke to had ever experienced this, so maybe for them it felt more like an adventure than like an annoying delay. And after all, they are convinced that they are being cared for

Anyway, we took the bus along the coast (the waves were quick high) to Noheji. Noheji station was even more crowded than Aomori, because there were many people that were going in the other direction, and were waiting for busses to Aomori. After a while, again something got announced, and we started moving towards the trains again. By now, I had gotten used to just picking some random person (that I judged to have some English skills) and tell them ‘hachinohe’ while pointing at some bus or train. This way, I found my way to another train and the waiting continued.

I must say that you get to know quite a few new people in this way. Japanese people apparently like to small-talk, and it doesn’t really matter to them whether you speak the language or not. For example, I had a whole conversation with some elderly couple. They didn’t speak English, but with some sign language and my trusty LP phrasebook (I learned to love it today) we could sort of understand each other. From then on, this couple looked after me a bit, because they were also going to Morioka. In any case, there were people coming to me all the time, asking where I had to go and whether I understood everything. They even answered for me, when JR people asked me something. ‘hai, kare wa hachinohe e ikimas,’ yes, he has to go to Hachinohe.

Eventually we also left this train and again had to take the bus. It were those busses that brought us to Hachinohe. However, me and also many of the other travelers had planned to take the shinkansen bullet train from Hachinohe (it is the northernmost shinkansen station), and the last one had left at 9 pm. The Japanese were right, though; we were being cared for. Namely, the railway people had already thought of a solution. They allowed us to spend the night in a shinkansen train on the station of Hachinohe. Also, we were given blankets, food and water, and free tickets for the first shinkansen of the next morning. Again, I met some more new people here, such as a Russian couple, two American Asians, and Yukie from Hokkaido.

After 5 uncomfortable (see photo) hours of hardly any sleep and a short shinkansen trip, I finally arrived in Morioka very early in the morning. It is funny, but I happened to run into the friendly elderly couple later that day in Morioka, and I saw the Americans in Kakunodate. It’s a small world after all, I guess… But it was a unique adventure. If the rest of this month will be anything like today…