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...Played A Bizarre Game of "Cat and Mouse" with a suspicious Japanese man at Shin Osaka station?
id I ever tell you about the time I... played a bizarre game of "cat & mouse" with a suspicious Japanese man at Shin Osaka train station?
I had just been left (for the 2nd time in 1 week!) standing at a train station in the pouring rain. This time the station was Shin Osaka and the woman was "Yoko", a lovely but paranoid woman who had contacted me a month earlier through a website devoted to connecting Japanese women with English-speaking men abroad. As we had previously arranged, we met each other for the first time upstairs inside the train station just two nights before.
Now Sunday night, I found myself with only 4 days left on a 1-week Japanese Rail Pass (a life saver!), no Japanese currency, and terribly low on American money. When I told her I was binbo (poor, or as she took it: broke), she helped take my luggage and guitar out of the trunk of her car (which had been there since Saturday afternoon, when we had our second date) and then had to wait ten full minutes before there was a break in the traffic so she could finally pull away from the curb, and me, standing there wondering what in the world I was going to do next.
Lugging all my belongings up into the station, I asked an employee of Japan Rail if there was any place I might be able to exchange some currency. He informed me Shin Osaka Hotel, just a 5 minute walk away.
With no choice available to me, I took a great risk by putting everything into one of the lockers, leaving the key in the lock, and taking my guitar.I ran out of the station in the direction of the hotel, shielding myself from the downpour with my guitar case while trying desperately not to slip and fall on my ass.
I exchanged some money at the hotel, made a phone call, and hurried back to the train station. Upon arriving at the lockers, panic immediately struck me. The key was gone from the locker and it was shut and locked tight!
I knew it was the right locker, so I only checked in a coupleof the surrounding ones, just in the off-chance that maybe someone switched them. But they were all empty or locked. I looked around to see if I was being watched. No one was lingering around, just nihonjin, either coming out of the station or stepping off of the escalators heading inside, all so rather meek in their daily existance.
My head was spinning, and my worst fear revealed itself -- what if was a yakuza? Osaka was teeming with them, I knew that, and I was always keeping an eye out for 'em. With 3 weeks still to go on a month-long ticket, an illegal part-time job teaching English, no definite place to stay, and nearly the last of my American currency just exchanged to yen, the last thing I needed was to be extorted by some real mean dude in the Japanese mafia.
When I began contemplating that practically everything I owned was in that locker -- including my laptop computer, my thumping heart was deafening.
It was then that I noticed him...
Sitting on the opposite side of the cement walkway was an older Japanese gentleman, diseveled in appearance, with an expensive store's shopping bag, handles up, on the ground beside him. He seemed to be gazing not directly at me but around me, almost as if he was trying not to look at me.
I needed some advice so I ran to the nearest public phone while discreetly trying to keep an eye on him. I called my friend in Sendai for advice. Actually, I just needed someone to rant and rave to and was already ranting and raving before she even picked up. Before I could fully explain to her what had happened, the man stood to his feet, picked up his bag by the handles, and casually slipped inside the train station. I told her I had to go, the guy who may have the key to my locker was on the move and I had to follow him!
And followed him I did, down the hallway, trying not to look like a henna gaijin, a strange foreigner, but it proved difficult, what with the wide vacant walkways and the big old black guitar cse I was carrying. It hardly mattered, though, he seemed to know as wellas I that one of us was being followed. He ducked off into the men's room and I started to go in after him, but thought maybe it was a trap. I follow him in there after the missing key,and I turn up missing, too. But,I thought, what if he's going to ditch the key, flush it down the goddamn can, what am I going to do then?
I looked around and just behind me was a grocery market. I ran inside the store and in panic-stricken Japanese implored two employees of the store to please call the police. The first young man jumped right to it while I tried to explain to the other what was going on.
The man emerged from the bathroom, looking directly at me this time but instead of walking away, he began helping an eldery man up the stairs. I apologized to the man who was so patiently bearing with me, before running after him. I stopped when, at the top of the stairs, the men bowed to each other before my guy turned and descended back down the steps in my direction.
I bee-lined back into the store where the two market employees approached me. The first one said the police had been called; the other asked me which man it was. I turned and pointed to the man who was standing about five feet away from us, looking in our direction, a blank look on his otherwise uninterested face. The first man went back in the store while the other lingered in the doorway.
With nothing more to lose, literally, I walked over to the motionless man. He turned to face me, like a dog looks at his master, as if to say, what have you got in store for me?
Me: "Ikura? Ikuradesuka?"
Him: "Nanio?
Me: "Ore no kagi. Motte iru? Kagi? Locka kagi? Asoko? Ikura desuka? Issenyen? Nissen yen?"
Him: "Wakarimasen. Wakarimasen."
In unison we both simultaneously turned away from each other. I walked back to the market and the man still in the doorway asked me what happened. In Japanese I told him what I said:
Me: How much? How much?
Him: What?
Me: My key, you have my key, to that locker over there? How much do you want? Ten dollars, twenty?
Him: I don't understand.
Two police arrived seconds later and I tried my best to explain about the locker, the key being gone when I came back, the guy I've been following around, who, now, was nowhere in sight. We never covered this type of situation in Japanese class, so my vocabulary was lacking in my explanation. The older grey-haired police officer was very kind and had me lead him to the lockers.
Once there, the older police officer asked who did I think did it, while his partner checked out the lockers. Standing by the lockers was the man.while where was he now. Trying not to be too obvious I said to the officer, "He's right there." I noticed he didn't have hisshopping bag anymore, and was relieved it had been too small to hold a laptop compter in it.
The officers approached him and began to question him. He became visibly upset and protested his innocence. The older officer walked over to me and from what I gathered told me that the man was homeless and couldn't even afford the 500 yen (5 dollars) needed to obtain the key. Furthermore, he said he saw someone at the lockers just before I got there and that they are waiting for someone to come.
They kept the man standing there until about ten minutes later when a Japanese man approached in a work uniform. He slid a key into the lock of my locker and opened it up, Inside, all my worldly possessions were just where I had taken a huge risk and stuffed them until I could get cash. The man,an employee of the station, or of the locker company, had come along, found my things inside and as a safety precaution, lockedthem up for safekeeping. Ooops.
This poor guy, literally, became the victim of my own stupidity. I apolgized profusely before reaching into my pocket to withdraw the small wad of big Japanese currency I had remaining. I offered him 1000 Yen ($10) for his troubles but he respectfully declined. Great, I thought, because --
The kind elderly policeman told the man in no uncertain terms that he should take the 1000. He did.
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3/2/05 7:52 PM