Gaijin Jump
By Craig Chapin. First published in June 1988.
When I traveled to Tokyo, I generally took the Seibu-Ikebukuro line to Ikebukuro Station. Much of the platform is covered, but one end of a longer train will stick out into the sunlight. Until the day recounted in the comic strip, I had always ridden in a car close to the front of the train. On this particular day I sat in a rear car, so I didn’t recognize Ikebukuro Station when we arrived.
People got off; people got on. I could not see a sign to identify the station from where I sat, but I knew it didn’t look like Ikebukuro. The train sat and sat, and I began to wonder if I had boarded a train that had veered off onto some other railway spur.
So in my best Japanese I asked a man seated nearby, “Does this train go to Ikebukuro?” He seemed embarrassed to be speaking with a foreigner, but after a moment replied in English, “Yes.” He sat back, looking relieved to have gotten this conversation out of the way.
(Many Japanese have a great anxiety about speaking in English. They have all studied it in school, but very few can use it productively. Many feel they should speak English with foreigners—even foreigners who don’t speak English and even foreigners who can speak Japanese. I suspect this anxiety prevented the gentleman seated near me from giving me a fuller explanation.)
As shown in the strip, the train pulled out of Ikebukuro Station, headed in the opposite direction. When I anxiously asked what was going on, the gentleman replied, “That was Ikebukuro Station.”
It was, of course, still an express train.