Katakai Adventure

It must be inevitable that every JET have a story like this, so maybe I should be grateful to get mine out of the way early on in my career (or perhaps just make way for more).

On Friday night I was to go meet some JETs in Murakami to go shopping and otherwise hang out. Murakami is not far away- 3 stops on the commuter train, so I purchased my 320 yen ticket and waited on the platform. At 5:35 there was only one train at the platform (that I could see), which seemed to be pointing in the right general direction, so I boarded and grabbed a seat.

As the train took off, I noticed that we were headed straight away from the sunset (Murakami is north of Arakawa), and started to get nervous. It's probably alright, I thought, the train will veer north soon and all will be well. After the first stop, however, it continued due East into the mountains of Honshu, so I decided to ask a passenger whether or not I was on the right train.

Me: Sumimasen, (mangled Japanese) Murakami ka?

Terrified Middle School Student: Hai, Murakami.

I don't know what she thought she heard me say (or indeed what I may have actually said), but at least for a time I thought I was on the right track.
By the time it became very clear that I was not, I had reached a remote mountain hamlet called Katakai, where I disembarked. Katakai had no convenience store worth speaking of, and consisted of a small number of houses and terraced rice patties strewn along the highway to Murakami. The waiting room of the Katakai station sported a bathroom, some posters, a fly the size of a human thumb, and some spiders that could have crushed the fly without a second thought. And mosquitoes. One of the posters also informed me that the next train would be arriving in about 2.5 hours...

I paced around, got some juice from the vending machine, and pretty much settled in. It would have been a bleak 2.5 hours, except that not long after I arrived the Katakai volunteer fire department showed up to have a barbecue under the station. Once I worked up the nerve to go talk to them, they were very friendly and loaded me up with roast corn, yakitori, and a cold Asahi. I told them my story (as well as I could), and they asked me the usual battery of questions (how long have you been here, where are you from, what do you do, do you have a girlfriend?). I also translated some of their English t-shirts for them.

Eventually the train pulled in, I bayed them farewell, and went back to Sakamachi (and to bed). Lessons learned: check the train schedule more carefully, and always bring bug spray everywhere (I was half-eaten alive). ...and learn better Japanese.