Chance Encounter

The odds were 5 in 32 million. Maybe I should buy Mini Lotto takarakuji tickets more often. Sadly, I won’t be calling into work “rich” anytime soon. This wasn’t about scratch-off luck.

Middle school students look alike in their uniformed uniformity, but something made me look twice at one girl walking towards me on the sidewalk. But my iPod was acting up again, so I glanced down to fiddle with it.

“Jefu?” Did someone just call my name? I looked up in panic. How does she know my name? She must be one of my students, but quick – from which school? She’s with four others. Hello, Omiyada 8th graders! Thank goodness for school-issued book bags. However, we were in the sumo district, not near their school where I had just finished teaching for the day.

They fumbled for English, and I for Japanese. We could only keep shaking our heads and uttering “ehhh” as the Japanese do when words fail.
“What are you doing here?” they pieced together.
“I live here! A 25-minute walk,” I said, pointing south. On my way home from Omiyada, I stopped to research offbeat museums in this area for an upcoming magazine feature.
“Now, what are you doing here, and why the hell weren’t you in school today?”

Turns out they, too, were on the museum circuit, but for a school project. The entire 8th grade was turned loose on the town, unchaperoned and armed with notebooks and disposable cameras to document their findings. Had it been Kanokita School, Tokyo would have been on orange alert.

This group had just come from the one-room fireworks museum, which was exactly where I was heading. “It closes at 4:00, doesn’t it?” They looked rather astonished, so I pulled out an itinerary with museums names printed in kanji to illustrate my own assignment. I considered buying them a round of burgers at Macku if they did some of my legwork.

I pointed them in the direction of the tabi museum where I had spent a whole 30 seconds. Tabi are split-toe socks worn with kimonos. We laughed at the absurdity of such a place, bested only by the Shinkansen (bullet train) brake museum and the safe and key museum nearby.