Now the Seikan Tunnel may not look like much on this map but it is actually the longest underwater tunnel on the planet: which obviously includes the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France.
According to the Internet this epic train journey would only cost me 13,800 yen (£70) which seemed cheap considering it was about 536KM (333miles) which is like London to Glasgow, and through a tunnel. So I was a bit nervous when I got to Hakodate station that morning to buy a ticket, in Japan buying a ticket in advance is not any cheaper.
In the train station I laid my notebook out in front of the man at the ticket counter so that he could see exactly which train I wanted. I was especially hoping that I had the right price because that was all the money I had on me at the time - it was a weekend and my Japanese bank had a habit of shutting down its ATM system for maintenance at the weekend regardless of how much money I had in my wallet.
The chap looked at my figures and agreed, pretty soon I had a wad full of tickets, including one to ride the Shinkansen, otherwise known as the Bullet Train.
I walked through the ticket barrier and got my first train, the Super Hakucho No.14. It took three hours and four minutes and the tunnel bit was quite a disappointment. I was expecting some kind of sign saying, “Seikan Tunnel in 3,2,1” and then blackness. Instead there was just little moments of blackness and then a long sequence of it, and then trees.
The only memorable bit of that journey involved train seats. On many trains in Japan you can rotate two seats to make them into four seats together. I was sitting on my own, next to an empty seat until a boy came on and caused trouble. I think he was trying to make four seats together for his family, none of which were meant to include me but he miscalculated. He got on and rotated the seats in front of me which meant I had to quickly grab my things from the little netted pocket in front of me before they disappeared. The boy looked rather perplexed at the new arrangement of seats he had made, which included me - a strange foreigner he had just uncovered.
When you are in that situation you suddenly feel very exposed, it is like someone has taken down your bedroom wall and replaced it with a family of four. The boy’s mother said something and apologised to me. The boy went to sit with his family, leaving me still feeling exposed but with too much pride to admit to it and put the seats back.
I bet there have been some Chaplin style sketches like that on Japanese TV. Imagine if a young couple are sitting happily together on the train until some unwanted person comes and swivels the seat in front of them. The unwanted man is now sitting and facing the couple, smiling at them and resting his hands on his cane. The boyfriend of the couple frowns, stands up and rotates their seat to get away from this nuisance man, but by doing so makes a new four seat collection. The unwanted man goes and sits in the new four seat arrangement so they can‘t get away from him etc etc. I fear that was too complicated to explain without losing all of its mirth.
I had to change trains in a place called Hachinohe and board the Shinkansen. The ticket for this world famous train line even has a special shape - and I had three of them. This foxed me a little as I didn’t know which to put in the machine. In the end I put all of them in and that did the trick, the machine was cleverer than I am and knew which ones to keep and which to give back.
The Shinkansen looks like this, or at least the one I caught did: their noses vary along the spaceship theme.
Inside, the Shinkansen has an element of luxury about it: the carpets are all clean, the doors swish open obediently, the seats are very comfortable and on some carriages you can even smoke. The ride itself is so smooth and quiet that it feels more like a plane than a train.
I searched for my reserved seat but couldn’t believe what I found sitting next to it so I checked my ticket again. Sure enough though, it was my seat. Sitting next to it was the only other white person I had seen all day. The train was not very full either, there were quite a few empty seats around. I wondered as I looked at the back of his grey haired head whether there was some function built into the Japan Rail systems that aimed to keep all of the foreigners together.
I had a decision to make: either to sit in an empty seat and face the consequences, or to sit next to this man and face the consequence. You might wonder why I was so against sitting there. Well we all like to sit alone don’t we, and what’s more I wasn’t really in the mood to be talking to someone else, especially in English. You probably think I was being silly, and in the end so did I. “Excuse me,” I said.
He looked, and then looked again in surprise. My seat was next to the window and he stood up to let me sit down.
“So, what part of Japan are you from?” he asked me, officially opening the conversation.
“Oh, a small island over to the East, it’s called Britain,” I said, though I had to untie my tongue during the sentence.
“And what are you doing so far from home?”
“Well, I’ve actually been in Japan for a year and a half. I was teaching English up until last week and I’m now going on a trip around Japan before I fly home in August.”
“Right, I see.”
“How about you?”
“Well I am also from Britain but I’ve only been here for a few weeks, doing missionary work.”
My heart sank. I know that’s a mean thing to say (not to feel, just to say) but this always seems to happen to me on trains. The most recent time had been while waiting for a subway train when a Japanese man in a suit had politely asked if he could ask me some questions. The first question was a very detailed one about Lincoln’s speech, and after I explained that I wasn’t American he moved on to Buddhism. He wasn’t a missionary or anything, he taught English and liked Buddhism. I enjoyed that conversation as he had more of an interest than an agenda.
The time before then I had been on a train in the UK, there had been no seats free and I was standing in the No Man’s Land between carriages. An American man with thinning grey hair had been walking down the train but stopped to ask me a question about something or other. From there a conversation began about where he had been and where he was going in the UK. From there he mentioned being a priest and asked me directly, “Do you believe in Jesus?” I gave him my honest answer, which is, “No.” From there he tried to convert me head on, peppering his comments with, “I’m not trying to convert you, but…” At the end of the conversation, otherwise known as Cheltenham, he said, “Thanks Nick. I can see now why I walked this way.” I was annoyed with that comment, he had failed to convert me in any way, actually he had put me off the cause even more. Yet he walked away sure that God had led him to me, and sure that he was on the right path in his life. But there is logical fallacy here:
Because he preaches without listening, he many never know that sometimes he puts others off his religion.
Polite nonbelievers will talk to him.
Impolite non believers he will ignore.
Therefore he can go around putting off nonbelievers and yet still feel he is doing God’s work.
Doubtless he got off the train and ticked another one off from his, “Let’s Convert - Travel Edition” book, while I walked away feeling ticked off in another fashion.
“Don’t bring up religion,” I told myself, “don’t invite him to start trying to convert me.” Perhaps because he wasn’t in the mood, or perhaps because he was British and more subtle, he didn’t mention religion head on. Mostly we talked about Japan and Japanese people.
I should probably describe him. He was probably in his early fifties with thinning grey hair and a bushy grey beard. He was wearing a shirt but had that unkempt look by which you could tell that he didn’t have a wife. When he stood up he turned out to be rather tall, I would estimate over six foot.
He too had been affected by the mass of police in Hokkaido, they had filled up the hotel he had been staying in and he said he was only to happy to get out of there.
We talked about Britain today and especially the paranoia there is about paedophiles and the safety of children. He mentioned how being an unmarried man he suffers some prejudice in the church and I mentioned how in Kent I saw a sign in a park saying, “Children under 12 only.” In Japan, we both agreed, the situation was very different. It is not uncommon to see young kids cycling around their neighbourhoods by themselves and doing grocery shopping for the family at a very young age. He mentioned being on a train and a child wanting to play with him. He obliged and at the end of the journey the child’s mother thanked him, “Can you imagine that happening in Britain today?” he asked me, the answer was no.
This attitude just does not exist in Japan. From my own experiences of having had six year old kids try to insert their hand into my rectum, and another who punched me in the genitals, the problem in Japan seems to be quite reversed.
After that I broke my own rule, I complained to him about street preachers who stop you while you’re out buying toothpaste to tell you that you are eternally damned but have a nice day. Once I was meeting my family in Birmingham and in between the station and the restaurant I got damned by a street preacher and blessed by a Salvation Army man collecting money.
I argued that it’s just bad marketing: telling people that they’re damned is not much of a hook to make you want to find out more is it. He argued that Christians have a responsibility to tell non-believers the truth. That sort of makes sense, if you saw someone on fire who didn’t know they were on fire then you’d have a responsibility to tell them pretty pronto about the awful truth. However, it takes a certain amount of audacity and arrogance to be so sure of your beliefs so as to confidently tell strangers that they are sinners and damned. I suppose that’s what faith is sometimes.
We talked of other things, of girlfriends, cities and the shinkansen. The train pulled up in Sendai and he stood again to let me pass as I made my way out into the hot air of Sendai railway station.
It’s a big station, big enough for a small tourist information kiosk where I got a map of Sendai and the kindly lady circled where I was staying with a red dot. It was roughly twenty minutes away by tired plod under heavy rucksack.
Sendai seems enormous when you get out of the station, there are two massive streets packed with shops and business that meet outside the station. A system of bridges carries thousands of people everyday from the street level, up to the station or across the roads. I found my way fairly easily, turning in to quieter streets and even quieter ones from there.
A sign pointing the way to the hostel told me I was on the wrong street and needed the next. I saw a small group of other backpackers entering a small hostel and tagged along behind them.
In the reception to the hostel there was the immediate smell of tatami matting, several fans swinging air left to right and a sweaty man behind a window.
The people in front of me showed him their passports and he gave them the speech of the rules you always get in hostels: when the front door gets locked, when you can have a shower, where the nearest laundrette is, what time you can buy the expensive breakfast from.
He sent them on their way upstairs not mentioning that there were no keys until they asked him. It’s a weird notion to be staying somewhere and not have a key. You could lock the room from the inside, he tried to reassure them, but still it’s not the point.
I got the same speech but different directions. My room was on the first floor, a room for three people. I was a bit nervous about this, it would be the first time I had shared a room with strangers for quite some time. “Is there anyone in there now?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said.
Hot turned hotter as I walked up the steps towards my room. The whole place had a traditional feeling with the smell of tatami and the polished wooden floors, but it also seemed characterless like it could turn into something else next week.
The rooms had slidey doors that felt weird to knock on, but I did. No answer. I slowly slid back the door and found an empty room.
It was larger than the rooms I had been staying in but it was very bare. There were no beds, just futons in the wardrobe to be laid out on the tatami matting. There was a window looking down to a central open area in the middle of the building with a tiny Japanese garden. The air conditioner above the window refused to work, I thought it might be the remote control until I saw that the inner workings of the aircon were poking out of the bottom in a shameful fashion. There was an electric fan in the room but it didn’t seem to do anything to help.
I unpacked, trying to keep all of my things in one corner in case someone else arrived. I slept for a while, had a shower and then walked out into Sendai.
It wasn’t that dark, I wasn’t that tired and I had nothing else to do. I reached the station and began walking down one of the main roads towards the river. My map said there was a tourist information centre in the library that would be open until 9pm.
I walked for a long way feeling cheerful to be in a new place again successfully: the task of getting to my new bed was complete, now I just had to make it seem worth the effort.
I crossed over a bridge and got to the other side of the river. The light was fading now and the streetlights were taking over for the nightshift.
I found the library which looked closed but the doors opened for me and I walked through the dark lobby expecting to be accosted. A room with lights on beckoned me and inside I found shelves of books, some computers and two women standing behind a counter. Other foreigners were silently using the computers or reading newspapers. “Can I help you?” said one of the women in perfect English.
I asked her about some of the sights I had read about in Sendai, she furnished me with leaflets, information and smiles. I was impressed. She was so nice and so helpful that it seemed she could solve all my problems, if I could only remember them. I asked her about buses to my next destination, Tokyo, and she looked online for me, printed off a timetable and explained a special offer the bus company was running.
We got talking about other things, she told me that she used to teach Japanese in the UK to Japanese children. I didn’t know there were schools like that, to teach the children of Japanese people Japanese. “Oh yes, there are lots,” she smiled.
They were closing for the night, it was time to leave. I left enlightened and trudged back to my hostel before the curfew. Sendai was putting on its neon eveningwear, the stressed suits staggered around with each other and the young stalked the streets looking for fun. I passed through it like it was all the same to me.
My room was still empty except for a humid cloud of heat that had collected in my absence. The fan couldn’t disperse the cloud but was able to punch it about like hitting a beanbag. I rolled out my futon and turned off the light. I turned it on again to reposition the fan. I wasn’t sure if I could sleep with a fan pointing at my head, I could.
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