Yokota by Train

The night the Red Devils lost to Yokota (34-6) at Bonk Field will not soon be forgotten at our house, and not just because Matt finally realized his dream of playing on Yokota's home turf. Matt is going to remember the Yokota game as the last time he went anywhere without his house key.

Yokota Air Force Base is in Fussa, a Tokyo suburb two hours from Yokosuka no matter whether you travel by car or by train. With Dan Brown's new book loaded on my Kindle and a pair of knitting needles stashed in my bag, of course I opted for the form of transportation permitting me to feel optimally productive, ie, smug.

Coming home was another story, one that required changing trains five times instead of three and that consumed three and half hours instead of two. I left the game with four minutes left on the clock so I could be home in plenty of time to meet the team bus. Such was not to be.

Somewhere in the middle of Chapter 22, just one station southeast of Fussa, my fellow passengers all disembarked in a flurry. This is how gaijin like me realize the train we are on will not be proceeding in the direction we expected. I did what I usually do in these now familiar but still disconcerting moments: followed the passengers moving the fastest. Normally this group leads me to a connecting train but this time the race-walking crowd led me straight to the exit turnstiles. Whoops! Not to worry, I got a lot of reading done in the half hour before the next train arrived.

Later, just west of Yokohama and in the middle of an especially complicated paragraph in Chapter 38, I hopped on a train headed in the wrong direction. Whoops again.

When I dragged myself through Gridley Tunnel at 1:15 am, pondering the mystery of what so many Japanese people were doing riding around on trains in the wee hours, I found Matt curled up on the hood of the car. Just his luck to beat me home the first time it crossed my mind to lock the doors when I left the house.