We are watching the bedroom towns of Kansai blur past, grey cloud and rain reinforcing the patterns of the apartment buildings arrayed along the sides of the tracks. The Pachinko parlors and their neon overwhelm seem less predominant than memory recalls and it may just be a matter of my attentiveness to them, perhaps the expectation of the wallop of inviting colour to imitate the cacophony of the gambling machines that were assembled behind those glass doors to numb the idle into emptying their wallets in the hope of a big hit.
The weekend was spent moving south and catching up with friends from decades gone by. Tokyo gave me the opportunity to catch up with friends who I knew over twenty years ago to check in, mark the passage of time and determine the way this place has evolved while we have aged more or less well over the 14 years since we last met. My 12-year-old son’s companionship has indicated the biggest change in my life since my last time through here and hearing me wax nostalgic may have prompted him to zone out are try to contribute to the conversation from the perspective of his own time line and the things that would be significant if and when friends head to Canada to reciprocate this visit and get familiar with my home turf.
Saturday’s travel included a stop in Nagoya and a chance to catch up with an old friend from my elementary and junior high school days. Apart from reminiscing about those experiences and exchanging notes on who we knew from the early 80s, we were able to exchange notes on the parallel paths we were unwittingly on. We have tracked each other down thanks to Facebook and have been able to acknowledge birthdays on each other’s walls over the last five years but that is insufficient when compared to the connection we could and ought to maintain in light of the quality of conversation we had and the benefit over the course of our lives. There was a bit of what-iffing as we caught up and compared notes on our paths through adolescence on to parenthood and paused to ponder the future that awaits with decisions about retirement and other inevitabilities of middle age. What is next for us and how are we going to manage getting through it? I hope that over time we can reassure one another that we can maintain the connection, but given the distance and the superficial bandwidth on social media, it would be a challenge.
Similar connections we rekindled when I returned to Hikone, the place where I started teaching in Japan. About 45 minutes northeast of Kyoto and blessed with a more leisurely pace of life, it was a beautiful place to get a feeling for the routines and habits that are at the core of day-to-day life with the hurly-burly of larger cities set aside. Meeting these colleagues after 20 to 25 years was wonderful. Throughout though, I was conscious of the fact that there was not enough time for all of the conversations that could occur and to cover all of the territory that we would cover during a longer stay or gathering. I’m left more conscious of the transience of our lives, especially with the paces we can move at. Perhaps it is a matter of typing away on a training that is sprinting much faster than the speed of my thought or fingers.
We have just zipped past Himeji, famous for having the largest original castle remaining in Japan, angling against the window for the very view that would allow us a glimpse through the cityscape that has cropped up between the old edifice and the train station. A lot of “Hang on, lean this way, THERE!” To get a brief look at it as we pass by after a brief stop.
Throughout the trip so far, I marvel again at the efficiency and timeliness of the trains. I actually glimpsed a sign in Tokyo two days ago that the bullet trains were nearly running on time again. It was noteworthy to see an indication that the trains were running with anything less than the precision that ought to displace all metaphors related to Swiss watch makers. When I first arrived here in 1995, I was always amazed by the train system. I wanted the trains to show up late, just once to prove that it was fallible in some small way. I’d stand on a track watching the clock and widening my eyes in expectation only to see the train emerge seemingly out of nowhere at the very moment I was ready to mark the occasion. It was enough to send me into contemplation of the possibility that Japan Rail was hacking the clocks to maintain their success in bring the trains in on time. Once that line of thought disintegrated into weird conspiracy theories, I abandoned the thought process.
This time around, as I see the efforts that JR staff undertake to navigate the large numbers of floundering tourists through the turnstiles and on their way to the desired landmarks they are here to check off their itineraries on the tourist trail. The thoroughness of completing transactions, whether face-to-face or at ticket vending machine, is such that there there are rigorous procedures to ensure that everything is done for the sake of minimizing the exposure to failure in any of the procedures and processes that they undertake. Beyond that I truly appreciate the attention to detail that goes into something that other societies would do in a more slipshod, take-it-for-granted manner. There is the establishment of the procedures, but the human buy-in is the thing that astounds. That attention to detail is apparent in those transactions I participate in and also in the train drivers’ monitoring of their route as they tear across the landscape. Errors do occur, I’ll admit that, but they are exceedingly rare. All of it rests on the commitment of these people to be equally thorough in their work each and every time they do it rather than letting it fall under the indifference of rote repetition.
