During the commute yesterday there were a couple of events that threw off the whole system for a while. Many of the employees at my company had to come in late, and Kuniko didn’t make it to work until noon, which is pretty dramatically late.
I guess the first problem was a suicide – someone jumped in front of a train rather than go off to work on Monday morning. The second problem was some power substation that went down, meaning large parts of the train line had to stop completely. Some people were stuck in trains for almost three hours, and I saw some people had to get out of their train and walk along the tracks to the nearest station.
So next time I talk about the amazing efficiency and convenience of Japanese trains please remember that there are bad days, too.
Luckily for me, I leave very early in the morning so my train (the first train from me station) wasn’t affected. By the time I left work in the evening the trains were (mostly) back to normal, so I got home right about the same time as usual. Sometimes it pays off to get up at (well, actually before) the crack of dawn.
