Everybody’s Favorite Gaijin: The Blog

One of Those Moments

March 11, 2009 at 7:56 pm (Uncategorized)

Ever since my eyesight got bad enough that it made a difference, I’ve been known to take my glasses off at seemingly inappropriate times. Nothing surprising, but mostly just when I’ve been walking somewhere that my feet can take me better than my eyes can, and clear vision isn’t necessary, and especially at night. I’ve maintained for some time now that one of the great side benefits to having to wear glasses is being able to take them off and see the world without them. It’s like those commercials they air around christmastime for a holiday compilation CD with the background of the super-soft-focus christmas tree, where all the lights are so blurred they don’t even look like anything solid, just fuzzy circular wisps of diaphanous light.

If you need glasses, and you remove them walking around a city at night, it’s kind of like that. Everything takes on this pleasantly dramatic air and you feel a little dreamy. It’s something that people with perfect eyesight miss, and I’ll take it as balance for the trouble of not being able to see my glasses when I lose them on a brown surface.

I did that tonight, at any rate, and I walked from school to the train (a 15-20 minute walk depending on route and speed and lights and such) with no glasses, letting the world slip by out of focus, and I got on the train. Standing maybe one or two people away (it was a crowded rush hour train — one only needs to google images “tokyo rush hour” to get a sense of what that’s like. The most ridiculous looking pictures are the most accurate ones.) was a gentleman who, I’d guess, was probably a young businessman going home from work. I’d put his age between 25-30, and I noticed, despite my poor vision, that he kept looking at me.

I peered back a couple times, and I saw his eyes move from my face to the hand clearly holding my glasses and then back to my face, where I assume he picked up (as people with glasses can do) on that look in a vision-impaired person’s eye that says “I am not entirely sure what’s going on right now.”  I smiled, and kept looking out the window, obviously enjoying the view of the blurry city going by, and after several minutes and a couple stops of occasionally inspecting me as if I was in the process of cheerily growing an extra arm and no one else could see it, he did something I didn’t expect.

He leaned against the door, looked at me, looked out the window, and removed his glasses, tucking them into the inner pocket of his coat. I stole quick glances at his reflection in the dark glass, which looked alternately back at me and out into the night. I couldn’t help smiling, and he clearly smirked a bit when when my eyes met his reflection’s. Another stop down, he was wincing slightly, not used to it, and just before we reached Kamata, (where I switch train lines) he retrieved his glasses and, blinking, put them back on. The train stopped and the doors opened, and as he stepped off just a second before I did, I wanted to be able to speak fluent Japanese more than any other time since I’ve been here.