depressing post of the month

Tonight the boards at Hakata Station listed the trains on my line as being well over an hour behind. After going up to my platform to check out the queues (which wound and wound), I waited 30 minutes for a train to come, and once one did, wasn't even close to being let on.

I tried to kill time by listening to a Mandarin lesson on my iPod, but finally decided to take a cab, because my feet were killing me and I didn't want to deal with waiting for the next train that was scheduled to arrive 40 minutes later (that I could tell -- the boards/announcements aren't in English, so it's hard to tell which number corresponds to what) that I might not have gotten onto, and would have been all sardine-like and squished had I gotten on, and that would've taken 20 minutes longer than normal to get home on because when the train is packed like that they drive slow as molasses.

When I got back down to the main station one of my students ran up to me and we were all "can you believe the lines!?" and decided to share a cab since she lives only a station away from me. I learned from her that there was an "accident" at a station two away from mine in Hakozaki. I asked: "a train-train accident or a person-train accident?" and she kind of winced and swallowed and nodded at the latter.

The term "accident" is what is used to describe a suicide - a lot of them done by jumping in front of a train or on the tracks - which is exactly what an accident isn't, except nobody here will acknowledge otherwise or say ANYthing about it, at all. I gasped and told her I felt bad about being annoyed at such little things like the long train lines and thinking about how my feet hurt and not wanting to be on a crowded train after finding out the reason for the delay, but she didn't react, waited a moment, and asked me how work was.

It's just strange -- me wanting to talk about it and think about it and shake my head and be sad about it out in the open, and her, swallowing it, along with so many others here, down down down into that national pit of non-acknowledgment where so many Japanese things - "accidents" and otherwise - go to die.