"My Baby Takes the Morning Train" ...

I have to apologize for my extended absence from the blog ... things have been pretty busy recently, and I haven't found much time for anything other than work and a little bit of sleeping mixed in.

At any rate, now I am back!

As I may have mentioned before, I have adopted the train as my method of commuting to work here in Japan, and it is fantastic. It's true that my commute is a little on the long side (~1 hour) but it is almost effortless ... I really enjoy it actually, it is very low stress and quite relaxing actually ...

As you can imagine, all sorts of people use the train for their commuting. In Japan it runs absolutely on time, I have never seen a train that arrives either early or late, and it is so convenient, that there is almost no reason to have a car at all ... People use it to go shopping, business men use it to get to work, and school children use it to get to school.

I have been particularly curious about the school children, because ... they are really really young ... for example, kindergarten age ...

This is surprising on a number of levels, first because they are on the train very early in the morning, before 7AM in many cases, which I cannot imagine is very good for anyone ... Secondly, they are completely unaccompanied. For me, that is an incredible situation, coming from America, where in some areas, kids can hardly be trusted to walk from their school to their parents SUV down around the drive.

There is one child who I have a chance to see on a regular basis, because we use the same subway stop, and every morning she is there with her father who see's that she gets on the train safely, but then it is up to her to get off at the correct stop and walk the rest of the way to school. It is incredible! Make no mistake about it, I am in a big city, and these kids are trusted to navigate their way around it successfully, even at 7 or 8 years old.

I could never see that happening in the US, I will grant that Japan is orders of magnitude safer, but even still ... I think it would take a really big change to achieve that level of trust back home ...