Taking on responsibility means taking on the power to displease.
Mama and I set out early this morning to purchase travel passes for everyone for the upcoming three days that we were about to spend in Tokyo. It felt like the economical choice, because these kinds of unlimited-travel passes are usually worth it when you plan to commute a lot, and who travels more than a tourist?
We’d consulted Onkar on the matter and while he wasn’t 100% sure, he told us the name of one pass that he’d heard of. It was valid for all metros and subways, but not JR lines (trains provided by the Japan Railways company). I looked up routes from our AirBnB in Tokyo to a few central areas, and learned that we had to take lines like JO, JB etc. JR wasn’t on the list.
The pass cost less than we would otherwise spend over our three days there, and the routes seemed valid — it was a good deal.
It was a bit difficult to find the station where we were supposed to buy these passes. The one closest to the AirBnB didn’t offer them, but they put us on a (luckily direct) train towards the closest one that did. It took us another good half an hour after we got there to find the right desk, asking around in my uselessly broken Japanese.
Google Translate came to the rescue and eventually we found the right place.
They told us that we could book the tickets through the Klook app — a highly used travel app in Japan that mom and I had downloaded beforehand — and collect it once we showed them the booking confirmation.
To be safe, I booked one single pass to begin with. The confirmation worked and after battling with the printer for a few minutes, the man at the desk handed me a physical subway & metro pass. Following this success, we bought 5 more for the rest of the group and set off feeling victorious.
There wasn’t much point in Mama and I activating our cards for the trip home. The 72-hour validity period would start immediately after the first tap, and the ticket home was relatively cheap. We would travel longer distances over the next three days and it made sense to extend the validity on the last day instead of now.
For some inexplicable reason though, I just wanted to give it a go. Maybe the doubt had already been creeping up on me, I don’t know. But for some reason I wanted to be sure, so I put my tickets in the station gates to get the train home, and well… they didn’t open.
It spit my ticket out the same side, as I stood and stared at Mama in sheer stupor.
We’d just spend 9000 non-refundable yen on this.
We thought we were being smart by buying one pass from Klook separately before the rest. Why didn’t we try actually using it too?
I was starting to panic.
We stood there for many minutes, recalibrating. The station closest to our AirBnB, Koiwa, was JR only, but perhaps there was another one nearby that could be reached by the metro or subway? Nope, an hour’s walk away, easily. Maybe we could take a short and cheap train from Koiwa to a station that was well connected by metro? I searched for a few minutes but it was difficult to interpret Google Maps to find which lines were & weren’t JR. Even dedicated metro & subway navigation apps included all lines with no filter option, and knowing there was no way I could hold a coherent conversation with the station staff left me frustrated.
Defeated, Mama and I decided to buy a ticket home for the time being and see if we could figure something out from there. Inside, we both knew there was nothing we could do. And the booking app was ample clear about no refunds.
At that point I was considering it a failure on both mine and Mama’s parts, but from something he said later at home I realised that while Mama was physically present, I was the one leading the operation. I’d fucked up.
Sure, it wasn’t a massive amount per person, but it wasn’t insignificant either, and I knew the family would insist on splitting the loss regardless.
I realized they must feel an annoyance toward me similar to what I felt toward them yesterday. Still, they were kind enough not to bring it up twice. That’s maturity. My respect for them grew in that moment, along with my tolerance for their faults and my realization that, no matter how hard we try, we’re all human at the end of the day, and coexistence is chaos, no matter how much we want to tame it. You can’t control everything; you can only learn to accept that some things will be beyond your control.
It’s in my nature to be a planner and a worrier when those plans get disrupted, but if I continue making the conscious effort required to stay calm even in the face of speed bumps, I’ll consider this trip a success.