For me to tell this story, I really need to start from the beginning, so please bear with me. It all started when many months ago, Lauren and I decided to ride the bus to church. This was our first encounter with the Japanese bus drivers evil side. Now, of course we had ridden the bus before, but we were always with Liz. During the ride, the bus driver stopped the bus to yell at me. I still to this day have no idea why he yelled at me. When Lauren was getting off the bus, he also yelled at her. Again-we have no idea why. After this experience, we vowed to never ride the bus again.
Of course, in a place where we rely on public transportation, we knew we couldn’t keep that vow. Lauren’s school is far from our apartment, so on rainy days, she needs to take the bus. One afternoon, we decided to take the bus to her school so she could make sure she was taking the correct bus. We tried in our best broken Japanese to ask a bus driver which bus would take us where we needed to go. He pointed towards a bus and we said thank you. We went and got on, and soon the bus started going, however it stopped so the bus driver could talk to the same bus driver that had helped us. He told our current bus driver that we had gotten on the wrong bus, and needed to be on the other one. So, they told us, and we got off. Now, that is the ONLY good experience we have had with the bus, so we thought-oh, this is great. The bus drivers were being SO nice! We were optimistic that maybe the bus wasn’t as bad as we had made it out to be. We boarded the correct bus, then headed to Aso-chu. We got to our stop, so we went to get off the bus, however, we didn’t know how much to pay because it wasn’t up on the board like normal. We tried to ask the bus driver, but he totally ignored us. We tried putting money in, but the slot was closed. The driver then gives Lauren his best “go to hell” look. I told Lauren, “Let’s just get off…I don’t care about paying if he isn’t going to help us.” So, we got off the bus without paying. After that, we ended up taking the wrong bus home, but eventually ended up at the train station and we took a train home. All that said, you can see that we haven’t had the best of luck on the bus.
Saturday night was the tip of the iceberg. We were with Liz, so we figured it was ok to take the bus. I mean, we couldn’t live in fear of the bus anyway, so we got on. We had been on the bus a few minutes when it was stopped to let a man off. The bus started moving again, then quickly stopped. Everyone started looking, trying to figure out what had happened. Well-I’ll tell you what happened—THE BUS DRIVER HIT THE MAN! Seriously, we were so shocked. The driver got off and helped the man up while a lady passing by on her bike called the police. The man who was hit walked away, but he was limping badly. Of course, in typical Japanese fashion, all the natives on the bus just took their seats and acted as if nothing happened while the 3 American girls sat in the back shocked and appalled. For this reason, I am vowing to never take the bus in Japan again. (Not really-but I won’t do it willingly.)
When we told this story to Daisuke he said, “When you 2 (Lauren and I) ride the bus again, let me know.” He says we have seen things in Japan that he has never seen in his 25 years of living here.
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