beimprobable's Journal

This morning, I packed a duffel bag, picked up a bit aroung my apartment, and then walked to the train station to catch the 11:16 express train that would take me to Tokyo. Despite losing my cellphone the day before and being awoken by quite a large earthquake, I was in pretty good spirits. It was a beautiful day. The awful summer humidity hasn't hit yet, the sun was warm, and there was still the last remnants of a winter breeze blowing to keep one refreshed and cool.  And then, upon entering the station, I discovered that the earthquake and caused enough damage to stop all trains coming from and going to the Sendai, the large city north of me, and, consequently, the city where my train was supposed to come from.

So, there I was, sitting on the platform for some indiscernable amount of time, clutching onto expensive express tickets I was hoping I didn't waste money on. (One is always very cautious of potential money wasters when one is living paycheck to paycheck. Schools loans, baby. They'll kill you.) With a sigh and a heave of my shoulders, I took a seat and slumped, feeling the late night and the early and unexpected wake up call heavy on my eyelids. 

The woman next to me, a little thing my size but rounder and old enough to be my mother, leaned over and asked what direction I was going. I didn't understand what she said at first because she spoke in the local dialect, so when I gave her my "I'm foreign and I have no idea what you just said look", she laughed. She was quite fond of talking and sometimes I understood and other times I just nodded and smiled and said, "Oh, I see. Yeah."  

Then, she asked me if I had atopy and motioned around her own eyes. I was a really surprised at first that she even know the word "atopy" but I manged to respond to her question. I told her because it was spring now, my allergies have been going nuts. And she just gave this knowing nod. It wasn't a courtesy nod, it was a nod that said, "Yes. I understand exactly what it is and I don't have misconceptions of it like every other Japanese person you've met." It was such a peculiar thing to witness. Then she said that her son had atopy and when he eats Cup Ramen, his skin gets itchy and he breaks out into hives. She asked me what had made me break out and I just gave a crooked grin and hunched my shoulders and said, "Everything." 

I've never really had someone know exactly what I mean when I say my allergies/my skin is going nuts. In Japan, it's hard to find anyone who understands things like that. Even people who speak pretty awesome English get swept up in their on misconceptions (this would be how I was suckered into tutoring a six year old and a 50 year old man in English two different days of the week once a week. But that's a long story in itself. I digress.) Even in America, with my friends and anyone else who knew relatively okay, when I say "allergies", they think it's only watery eyes and sneezing, congestion maybe, sinuses, something like that. They don't realize that my allergies manifest through my skin, and how complicated that gets when literally everything from someone's hands who touched an animal, dirt, or just covered in their own sweat before touching me, the different airborne dust/dirt/smog/smoke/fragrances in different places, laundry detergents, soaps, non-smooth, thread-woven, cotten materials (fuzzy blankets are OUT), oh yeah, and stress and nutrition, and more, can cause me to itch and scratch so hard I give myself abrasions.

Hours later, finally on a train bound for Tokyo, I was reading a book called The Power of Kindness: The Unexpected Benefits of Leading a Compassionate Life by Piero Ferrucci and he talked about how acknowledging someone's presence beyond mere courtesy, how understanding their plights beyond a general glaze of superficial listening, and how truly comprehendng what they are saying is an act of kindness, that it makes us feel like we aren't invisible. Someone sees us. And in that one person, we have found prove that we do, in fact, live, that we exist. 

 That is a form of kindess, don't you think? 

That's exactly how that woman made me feel and I realized that, after almost a year of beng in Japan, I'd just settled nicely into a state of being where I went largely unnoticed and unacknowledged, an invisible almost non-entity. I was touched immensely by her kindness.

I asked that nice woman her name, and she gave me her phone number and told me to call her anytime. When I buy a new phone (I lost my yesterday), I think I may very well call her, though it feels strangely out of character for me to do so.