smoking grandpa

the japanese smoke alot, probably about as much as they drink. social events are usually just one long night of drinking, smoking, and sashimi. the weird thing about japan is not only can you buy your cigarettes and sapporo beer from vending machines right on the train platforms, you can also puff your way onto the train-only the express or bullet trains that go long distances-and keep puffing in the designated smoking cars. no separate ventilation or closed off areas just alternate smoking, nonsmoking cars. i didnt know about these smoking cars last summer because i took buses for my long-distance adventures; tsukuba didnt have its own train station yet. but early last month i discovered them the hard way...

the super express train to tokyo arrived and i boarded like everyone else at one of the train doors. an hour later to my surprise-i wasnt playing confused foreigner that time-i was booted out of the reserved seat that i didnt reserve. maybe i should have paid attention to the announcements saying which cars were reserved and unreserved instead of listening to music and dozing off. anyway so i went thru the train looking for a seat in the unreserved cars only of course by this time there were only a handful of seats left and those remaining were in a smoking car. it was the worst 40 minutes of my life. okay maybe not that bad but...all those years of keeping away from second hand smoke, convincing my mom to go outside to smoke, being repulsed by the smell of smoke finding its way on my clothes, all those years of going out of my way to keep my lungs clear and beautiful...wasted.

it was horrible. i spent some of the time standing up in between cars for the fresh air and walking thru the other 2 unreserved cars again just to see if there were any newly empty seats. no other seats and nowhere to stand anymore either so i went back to my seat in the smoke car, with some young children too who didnt seem at all bothered nor were their parents/child abusers. i was one of the first off the train and immediately took a few minutes just to breath again. i actually felt sick and cursed japan a million times until i found that really great ibook for really cheap.

i wasnt surprised to discover the indoor smoking areas in the hitachi lab buildings. in fact several of the men in my group alternate between coffee and cigarette breaks. the other suzuki-san is possibly the only smoker besides my mother that i dont mind being around. he`s knows no english except for `okay` but i think of him as my japanese ojisan/grandpa, although i would never call him ojisan to his face... he`s old but not that old. i tolerate his lingering smoke smell only because that, plus his extreme kindness and the way he watches over me, reminds me of my mother.