Lost in Japan Part II: Snowed In

On November 27th, I took the world’s longest under-ocean train. It shot north to Aomori – the northern tip of the island of Honshu – before diving into a black cave, as though bolting through a mine shaft. The train reemerged an hour later, with a blast of harsh winter sunlight and snow and mountains, on the northern island of Hokkaido. The train continued north and east until it stopped at Sapporo Station at 8:30 AM.
After walking around the station for a few minutes, I found the east exit. I made my way outside, and stepped onto the concrete city sidewalk, as puffy snow fell from the gray-washed sky.
My new boss, Jude, picked me up in a white van –
I was alarmed at Jude’s tall, skinny stature and his brown hair shaved almost bald. He looked to me like an extremist of some kind – with his hawk-like eyes and that gaunt, angular face – but he was in a suit and tie. Despite the suit, the word skinhead came to mind.
His Kiwi accent was thick.
“Ay mate, ‘ow was youwa travels?”
My head was spinning an unspeakable kind of anxiety.
“Um… good.”
“No troubles?” he said.
I exhaled.
Am I about to actually have a real conversation with someone in this country?
“Well,” I said, “it’s pretty hard to figure out directions in those big train stations, isn’t it? I wasn’t sure which exit you’d be at. That station is huge.”
He snapped his head and looked at me cross as he pulled the van into traffic.
“If youwa gonna live in their country, you’d betta learn theya bloody fucking language, don’t you think? You coudn’t even open youwa own bloody account.”
I shook my head and blinked a few times, startled, then smiled and laughed in discomfort.
“Isn’t that kind of hard, learning to read Japanese? I’ve only been here for three weeks.”
He glared at me with a raised eyebrow, then peered back through the windshield, weaving through Sapporo’s city traffic.
“It’s just a bloody fucking excuse, idn’t it? Just anotha fucking lazy American, raw-ight?”
He nodded at me as though I was required to nod back.
I looked away from him, out the windshield at the icy road, with a defiant scoff.
“Right.”
I glanced at him again, as we caromed down the city street. Jude had a scar over his left eyebrow.
After two days of training in Sapporo, Jude walked me back to that white van, now parked in front of the company’s downtown office building. There, he introduced me to an exhausted-looking salaryman in a gray, pinstriped suit. The stout man entered the right side, gesturing for me to walk around. I entered the left, passenger-side of that tiny white roller skate van, under a high blue sky and a white sun.
The door crunched with the sound of icy friction when it opened, and then again when it closed. Once inside, the van went silent.
The man cranked his bundle of keys, and the van fired up. Only the engine’s rumbling, the blasting heater, and a Japanese talk radio show ran in the background.
The woman on the radio, giggling in her low-pitched voice, bouncing off the cold van walls, further creeped me out –
This man glanced at me once as he pulled out, and weaved through city traffic, then into the mountainous countryside.
As the city stripped away to brown forest covered in snow drifts twice the height of the car, I looked at this man.
“It’s cold here,” I said.
He pointed out the windshield with his white-gloved hand.
“Japanese snow.”
Then, he nodded.
Total silence –
Those were the last words spoken between us for the next two-and-a-half hours.