Toward the end of the twentieth century, I was living in a Tokyo apartment and commuting once a week to Urawa in Saitama Prefecture to teach English conversation. I worked for a dispatch-based language school, assigned to a community center in a residential area about thirty minutes by bus from Urawa Station. The ninety-minute commute each way was far from easy, but the journey to the leafy suburbs offered a small escape from the chaos of the city center.
Each week, about ten elementary school students would gather at the center after school. Following the company-issued curriculum, I tried to convey the joy of speaking a foreign language.
One week after the rainy season began, headquarters contacted me. They told me that an American instructor named Scott would accompany me to the next lesson. The school’s policy was to dispatch contracted native speakers to each class twice a year, giving children a chance to experience authentic English.
It was pouring that morning. I waited for Scott at the Ikebukuro Station ticket gate. In those days before smartphones and the internet, meeting someone at a terminal station relied on intuition and luck.
A few minutes past the appointed time, a short white man in his early forties appeared. His cheap shirt was soaked to the shoulders, water dripping from his trouser cuffs. He carried no umbrella. The exhausted expression, thinning hair, and defeated gait — he radiated the particular emptiness of someone worn down by life.
On the crowded Yamanote and Keihin-Tohoku lines to Urawa, the cars were stifling and the windows fogged over. After brief pleasantries, Scott began venting his grievances.
How unbearable Japan’s rainy season was. How he had never in his life used such a primitive tool as an umbrella. How irrational it was that public transportation lacked air conditioning. How inefficient Tokyo was as a city, and how backward Asia as a whole remained — he spoke in fluent, uninterrupted English.
I listened in silence. I was less interested in his assessment of Tokyo or Japan than in the vocabulary and phrasing natives used when complaining. “I see, I thought, so that’s how you make sarcasm land in American English.”
A long line had formed at the bus stop in front of Urawa Station. The bus was delayed by the heavy rain, but we would still make it on time for the lesson.
When the bus finally arrived, it was packed. Most passengers clutched wet umbrellas or raincoats. Humidity saturated the sealed interior, the windows completely fogged. Even locals accustomed to the bus route were grimacing. The next thirty minutes would be an ordeal for everyone.
Scott was sweating, his eyes bloodshot. Eventually his discomfort reached a breaking point. He leaned toward me and whispered in my ear.
“Do whatever it takes. Find a chance and get out of this country as soon as you can. There are so many better places in the world. This is hell. The worst. Escape now and make something of your life… I’m getting out to America soon myself.”
His face flushed red, he was dead serious.
In that moment, I recalled a scene from a Hollywood film I’d seen a few weeks earlier — the protagonist barely escaping a war-torn capital in a relief helicopter. Is Japan really that terrible to you? I thought, and simultaneously burst out laughing. Scott looked at me with bewilderment.
Decades have passed since then. I’ve traveled the world for study and work. I’ve been stranded for two hours on the Paris metro, nearly passed out on a Bangkok bus with broken air conditioning. I’ve experienced the stench of New York’s summer subway and London’s winter transit paralysis. There are still countless forms of transportation around the world more brutal than that bus from Urawa Station.
Scott, if he’s still alive, must be close to seventy now. I wonder if he ever bought an umbrella. If he were to revisit Japan today, what would surprise him, and what would disappoint him? At least the trains and buses have air conditioning now, and the world’s most accurate weather forecasts can track rain clouds in real time. The country he was so desperate to escape should be a somewhat more comfortable place than it was back then.
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