That Time I Manhandled an Old Man

I make it a point to go out on my off-days. My apartment is on a quite street in a fairly quiet small city. So, I separate it out from the rest of my life. Fives days a week I go to work, sometimes for 11 or 12 hours. Come back to my quiet apartment and crash. Off-days, I hop a train into the city. 99% of the time I'm in Shinjuku for my first day off. The second I typically stay home to finish up my laundry, or pay pills, or grocery shop.

It's safe to assume that this started in Shinjuku, or a few stops after. It was rush hour, but I'd arrived early enough to manage a front spot in line, so had gotten a seat.

(Just in case you aren't aware of what rush hour in the cities look like, here's Ikebukuro.)

Fun fact: I'm wandering around without a phone. So, on longer train rides I try to bring a manga, and try to read it. Which means I stare at 3 pages very hard trying to make sense of it. Except during rush hour. It's too tight to... well move in general. During rush hour I watch other people play on their phones, or just look around the best I can.

This night, there was a high school boy wedged by the nearest doors. I noticed him because he kept looking over at me. It isn't an unusual thing. Being a gaijin, I get stared at. Sometimes it's very old people. Most of the time it's small kids. Point being, I filed it away as the usual, and went about what I was doing (watching a businessman play some type of game like Dance Dance Revolution on his phone, except with a chibi group of girl idols dressed in short skirts).

My station is a pretty big transfer station, so the train usually stays very crowded the whole trip. Tonight was no different. I heard my station called as the next stop, so get ready to stand to let people know to move. Suddenly, an old man shouts "[Thanks]".

Now, the stereotype of Japanese trains being very quiet is a high 90s fact. Except for local trains in the morning that are almost empty except for retired ladies going to lunch (because they're chatty with each other), or when you have kids coming back from a good sport club activity (like when the boys win their games), the trains are dead silent. So, this one word got everyone's attention.

Turns out the old man was a blind old man. And, it turns out he was thanking that same high school boy that had been staring who--since I'd lost sight of him during a surge--I assumed had exited.

Immediately, I understood that the two were strangers. The old man wouldn't have thanked the boy like that if he was family, and the boy wouldn't have rushed back to the old man the way he did. It's difficult to explain the type of urgency he had.

Well, I don't think too much more of it, since it was my stop. I'm stuck behind the boy and old man as they get off. I step around and in that one flash a few things happened:

1. I notice the boy hastily explaining things to the old man
2. I notice the boy trying to point, getting flustered because pointing does work with a blind person, so trying to gently but quickly turn the man
3. I notice the man bobbing his head like he understands, but also being too hasty
4. I notice the boy wavering between jumping back on the train or not

The situation took a different turn. Normally, when a blind person comes through, a station attendant is there to greet them on the platform. There was none. And, another twist, the boy locked eyes with me for the splitest of seconds before jumping back on the train just as the doors shut. That poor kid looked so anxious.

So, I did what I'm pretty positive what I'd been tasked to do by some random high school boy: I watched the old man and followed him slowly. He's wandering about the platform, going away from the stairs up. I approach him and ask "elevator" since only the elevator, escalator, and sheer drop off the platform are that way and I was hoping the word sounded similar enough to the Japanese version.

Naturally, the man was confused because suddenly an English word is coming at him. He repeats "elevator" and I turn him in the right direction. He... runs into a column and starts saying "escalator, up". I try turning him a couple times, but he... he just had a lot of trouble with that column. I grab him by the shoulder and elbow--which is as awkward as that sounds--and basically drag him to the escalator. He kept saying "[thanks]" the whole time, and I was just awkwardly silent. Because, well, I have zero clue what the response is and it was already clear he didn't speak or understand much English.

I took the stairs up, and waited at the top to see if he was trying to transfer trains, or if this town was his stop. There are a lot of blind people that come through here, so I think there is some type of support association in the area.

(blind guide in the stations/on the sidewalks)

The old man wasn't transferring. I watched him mull about the station, using the guides on the floor to get out of the gate. I stay quiet and exit after him. He's going my direction, so I walked slow until he got on the down escalator. Then, I ran down the stairs (as is habit) and went home. I figured if he was going to the taxi point there would be others to assist him.

I've made it a point to learn the response for when people say "[thanks]" though, just in case this happens again.