The Shuuden

"Sherman, set the Wayback for Saturday morning, September 2nd, 2007 at Shinagawa Station in Tokyo Japan."

"Golly, Mr. Peabody, what happened there?"

"The beginning of a very long trip for Juliet Carnell."

It was a simple mistake. I was buying my Shinkansen (bullet train) tickets for my Sunday trip down to Nagoya and back. Somewhere in the process of answering a dozen or so badly worded English questions I failed to tell the machine I wanted to come back on a bullet train as well. I took the incorrect tickets to the counter and spent the next twenty odd minutes speaking very confusing Japanese and English to three JR ticket agents. They finally convinced me I needed to give them 4600 more yen and they would give me the return ticket I needed.

I handed over the pretty blue paper and a few coins and they gave me a ticket for the 10:25pm Shinkansen out of Nagoya on the following evening. Go back to the last entry for my touching description of a wonderful day filled with new experiences at the hand of my old friend Nami. We last left our heroine at the gates to the JR tracks waving goodbye and looking forward to a restful high speed return to her hotel in Tokyo.

I put the tickets (one for the standard roundtrip fare and another for the bullet train) into the turnstile and marched through. I went up to the platform with plenty of time before my 10:25 departure. The platform was crowded but emptied out when a Shinkansen arrived at 10:09. It pulled out precisely at 10:10pm and I waited for my train to appear on the big electronic sign. Instead a man in uniform appeared and began turning off the escalators and lights.

The next twenty minutes had me trying to ask every uniformed person in site: A) "What happened to the 10:25 Shinkansen that I have a reserved window seat on?" B) "How am I supposed to get back to Tokyo before my tour group leaves for Kyoto in the morning?" and C) "Does anyone around here speak English?"

I ended up at the JR fare adjustment counter with a young woman who's idea of speaking English was adding English nouns to Japanese sentences and four guys behind the counter who were more interested in how I came to have a valid ticket for a non-existent train than how I was going to get back to Tokyo. They suggested I wait and take the first train in the morning, but that would be too late. Not to mention I had nowhere to stay in Nagoya.

The girl kept telling me, in Engrish, that there was another train, but for some reason, "You can't get on that one." Finally the stationmaster showed up. He barked a few orders to the guys behind the counter who jumped all over themselves to give me a refund of the 4600 yen I paid for the Shinkansen ticket. Then he took out a radio and barked more orders into it. The only words I could pick out were "English" and "right now'.

Within two minutes a tiny young woman, who looked like she was right out of high school and wearing a uniform so new you could see the creases from where she took it out of the bag that morning, came running up. She listened to the stationmaster for a minute then turned to me and said."Very sorry. Overnight train is reserve only. You can't get on that one... unless you pay for reserved seat."

"How much is that?"

"Extra 510 yen." That's only about $4.50

"These guys just gave me 4600 yen, why didn't they take the 510 yen out of that and give me the ticket?"

She looked at her boss, then at the guys behind the counter. "They are idiots."

I handed the idiots two coins and they gave me a ticket for the Moonlight Nagara, a local train that left Nagoya at midnight and arrived in Shinagawa at 5:00am. The stationmaster made the poor little girl bow and apologize to me, but I could see in her face that she'd been bumped up a notch on the stationmaster's list of useful people. I returned the bow and headed for track two to await my long ride home.

I managed to get a little sleep on the Moonlight Nagara in spite of them leaving the lights on all night and the train stopping at every single little station between Nagoya and Tokyo. At just after 5:00am Monday morning I trudged up the hill from Shinagawa station to my hotel, packed my bag for the trip down to Kyoto and headed for breakfast. I was tired, but happy to be where I was supposed to be, when I was supposed to be there and with someone else in charge of the Shinkansen tickets for the next stage of the trip.

"So what went wrong, Mr. Peabody?"

"Juliet almost missed the shuuden."

"What's the shuuden?

"It's Japanese slang for the last train of the evening."

"But she did miss the last bullet train of the evening, Mr. Peabody."

"Really, Sherman, even you should know to always listen carefully to the Moonlight Shuuden Aid."