I woke up with a jolt when I heard: Next stop will be Kawasaki, Kawasaki!

I fell asleep and it took me a few seconds to realize where I was. I looked at the screen in front of me that said Kawasaki in green letters, opened my phone and checked the app. Yes, I just passed the Yokohama station where I was supposed to get off. Since I was taking a fast train, it didn’t stop at other stations. Nine minutes on the road, waited another ten, nine minutes back to Yokohama, where I took the subway to finally get home, an hour late. This is what I needed!

When I told Dee he started laughing at me throwing his head back and said look at me Japanese, He said that every day Japan steals a little more from you. He returned it when he saw the change in my face. Come on, now don’t get upset, maybe you’re tired, he took me by the shoulders and I went into the first izakaya (Japanese pub).

Dee had been in Japan for eight years, working for one of the big IT companies. I met him at a concert in Ebisu last August. He stood far from the stage with a glass of whiskey in his hand. The ice melted, and it seemed to me then that someone had forcibly brought him and planted him there in the landscape. We started chatting, I wasn’t too interested in what was playing that night either. Sometimes conversations are very easy to strike up, especially when you meet a stranger like you.

We made it a habit to go out once every few weeks and cut down everything that came our way. Di always told me that she wished she had met me before she came to Japan and that I must have been a different person. Have I really changed that much? I didn’t want to believe it in my head. True, sometimes I fell asleep in the subway, but this did not mean that I turned into a Japanese woman.

I’ve heard of trains in Japan, and since I moved to Yokohama, I’ve seen quite a few. From drunken corporate men slumped on the floor, from young ladies finishing their perfect make-up to ladies with portable curling irons. There were, of course, foreigners who brightened up the place by talking loudly, especially those who were taking something on board. And now I was among Japanese people who instantly fall asleep when they get on the train.

The first time I boarded a shinkansen (high-speed train), I thought I was on a plane. Everything looked the same, from the rows of seats to the girls walking around tactically pushing a food cart. The only difference was that here you had to buy what you wanted, in fact, which I keep saying, like on a low-cost flight. Then I drove about 800 kilometers in 4 hours. From Yamaguchi Prefecture to Tokyo City.

This station seemed to me to be a huge animal hovering over the city, consisting of ten island platforms, from which it spreads its tentacles throughout the city, with 20 lines. I was instantly dizzy when I got off the train and had to make my way past hundreds of people walking in every direction. Here, people didn’t have the patience they had in Yamaguta, and didn’t even notice that I was a little lost in the space to stop and ask if I needed help. At that time, I didn’t even have a phone with a save application, I had to do it the old fashioned way, with a card.

Another station that breathes through the more than three million passengers who visit it every day is Shinjuku. This time we are talking about a real maze, how many times have I been, honestly, every time I got lost and came to meetings sweaty, almost in tears and very late. An underground city with 35 platforms connected to the surface through numerous halls and shops, without actually leaving the station to access the other 17 platforms on the upper floors. With a total of over 200 exits, Shinjuku Station is the busiest station in the world and registered in the Guinness Book of Records. Fortunately, the Japanese are not the type to lie on their ears, shrug their shoulders and say: figure it out, we forced you to leave the house?! A few months ago, sometime in March, I found out that Shinjuku Station was undergoing a renovation, a “rejuvenation project” as they called it, to make it easier to navigate, a huge transformation, as all the news channels said. One alive and one seeing, until 2046 when they finish putting the puzzle together.

Having hit your head and spent a day in Tokyo on the subway or train, you have hardened and are no longer afraid of anything. Other stations will seem toy to you.

When I left Yamaguchi, I sold the car and regretted it very much. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro