I’ve seen a lot of strange things on Japanese trains these past five years. Drunks passed out on the benches, old women (and I do mean old) dressed in school girl uniforms, ‘train parties’ where people spend hours riding around while drinking, just to name a few. But this evening as I rode home on a train packed with people going to and from viewing fall leaves I happened to notice something that made me pause and think, ‘well, that’s a first.’
My girlfriend, who was dressed is a beautiful kimono, was leaning up against a wall due to a lack of seats and I was standing face to face with her, eyes looking out the window. We were talking about this and that making plans for what to do over the next few days when I did a casual once-over of the train.
Now, normally as we scan a room our eyes hesitate briefly on things of interest, things in motion, things out of the ordinary, before returning to our main subject of interest (in this case my girlfriend) but as I glanced at the high school boy seated to our right I could not refocus my attention.
The young boy was staring intently at his cell phone with headphones securely jacked in his ears. There was something about what he was looking at that seemed very familiar but was too blurry to make out. The motion, the colors, something, I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
Then suddenly it snapped in to focus and I couldn’t believe it what it was.
I gestured for my girlfriend to take a look and her face turned beet red. I had to look away because I was working hard to stifle a series of hearty laughs. She couldn’t tear her eyes away or believe what she was seeing.
The kid was watching porn (pr0n to some of you).
I don’t mean the soft-core stuff you can easily get in Japan that has an annoying blurry patch over everything interesting (boo mozaiku!), but the hard-core stuff you find in porn stores in the U.S.
As we stood there, stations passing one by one, he watched not one, not two, but three clips, returning to the first one just before getting off (the train). The whole time an old lady sitting beside him didn’t notice, or at least pretended not to.
I offered the now empty seat to my girlfriend but first checked to see if it was clean. She stifled a laugh and we decided it would be better to wait for another bench to open up.
Definitely a first.
Only in Japan.
