So goes the train. It crosses here roughly every 5–10 minutes all day from 5am to midnight.
Hmm... looking at the photo again after posting it, it almost looks like a TV capture. Old analog TV that is, not modern HDTV. It's actually an iPhone photo with a piece of cling film over the lens to give more of a blurry quality. Anyway, moving on...
Trains in Japan are quite convenient. They come fairly often and can take you anywhere in the country. Coming from the US where you have to drive to get anywhere, I was kind of shocked the first time I traveled across the country entirely by train, not getting into a car even once.
I'm sure you have all read about how the trains in Japan are never late and how on the rare event they are as much as 30 seconds late, the train conductor personally apologizes to everyone on the train. Uh huh, sure. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The streets are paved in gold too, by the way.
Truth is the trains are late more often than they are on time. The private train companies are often better about it than JR, the national train company, but even they are often late. I think where the myth of always on time starts from is that while they are often late, that tardiness is often no more than 5–10 minutes, thought it can be up to an hour or more in the case of "human accident", i.e. suicide, where someone throws themselves in front of the train, which happens more often than any of us wish it did, at least a few times a week.
5–10 minutes may not seem like much, but train scheduling is often much more ambitious and leaves little extra room for being late, so if you have some connections to make 5–10 minutes can be enough to make you miss the connection and be late to work where you will be yelled at mercilessly by your boss and made to work extra overtime everyday for a few weeks as penance. We often make fun of how salarymen will be sprinting as fast as they can to catch a train even though there is another in just 15 minutes, but knowing the above you might understand why they do that.
My youngest son (1 1/2 years old) calls trains "ting ting", mimicking the sound the train crossing alert makes. I suppose this might be kind of normal, because my 5 year old did the same when he was this age. Or maybe my kids are just strange.
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