I had no plans at all yesterday morning, but I got a text from Ayumi about 11am saying she was on her way to an interview in Tokyo with Kaori. I asked if she was busy after, she said she wasn’t and told me to come up to Tokyo for the day, so I threw together enough entertainment (that is, Japanese homework, a book, and my Nintendo DS with hardly any battery left) into a bag to get me through the journey, went to the post office to withdraw enough money for the day, and hopped on the first train out of here. At the station there was a girl sitting at the same platform as me and I started talking to her. Turns out that she was going to Tokyo too so I had someone to keep me company all the way there, which was nice. Her name was Izumi and she’s was in Okazaki because of her job: doing clerical work for Toyota Motors. She had been to Italy once before but that’s all and so had lots of questions about Ireland and the Japanese language and culture from the perspective of a foreigner, etc. I showed her some photos of Ireland and my trip to Japan last year from my camera and when she saw my dad she said “that’s you dad?? I thought it was Bruce Willis!!” I’ve heard it said that Japanese people have trouble telling white people apart, which is actually good news because it means that we all look like Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp to them.
I arrived at Tokyo, changed trains to the Chuo line and got to Shinjuku where I met the girls at the West gate and we left the station and found the street to their next interview. I hadn’t eaten breakfast so we went to Yoshinoya for some gyudon which was really really good but poor Ayumi’s stomach didn’t like it so much and was hurting for the rest of the day. Kaori had no problem with it 
Next we went back towards the station and looked around some clothes shops. We looked in Zara first which didn’t have much men’s clothes so we went to the Gap and I bought a pair of jeans (‘pair’ meaning one object), a pair of zip-up hoodie shirts (‘pair’ meaning two objects) and a pair of t-shirts (‘pair’ meaning two objects). The girls were so great and had no problem accepting my feedback when the suggested ridiculous clothes, even though they were “cute”. Ayumi pretty soon had worked out what I’d like and what would suit me and was going back and forth from the shop floor to the dressing rooms with shirts and stuff.
The salesman was also very helpful. He was a pretty funny guy, but not in an intentional way. He had no idea what was going on around him, so when he was talking to one lady, he raised his hand up in some sort of gesture and ended up sticking a customer who was approaching from behind in the eye. He had been helping this customer in English so he immediately started with “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!!” while the customer held his hand up to his eye looking like he was going to cry. The salesman kept trying to get a look at it, to see if he was really badly hurt either out of compassion or out of fear that he was going to get in trouble for it. It was so hard not to laugh out loud, especially with the poorly pronounced stream of “I’m sorry”s and “are you ok?”s.
He gave me some good information, such as clothes generally shrink in the west but stretch in Japan. This is because in Japan, clothes are always dried outside on a washing line and stretch out, but if you use a dryer then they tend to shrink, so whatever clothes size you buy should be based on how you wash them.
Next weekend I’m going to Tokyo to meet Ayumi, as we had been planning, but her dad said that I should stay in her grandmother’s house before I leave Japan, seeing as I liked it so much, and invited me up for the night, so that’s what I’ll be doing. I’m really looking forward to that and I’ll get to sleep in a Japanese style room, I think!
It was a really great day and I’m so glad that I went up to Tokyo for the day, with about 30 minutes notice. As my uncle Jim advised, Carpe Diem.
Donal Heffernan == Bruce Willis
Brilliant!