How to Be Very Japanese

I hadn't been in Japan very long when this happened, maybe only a month or two, maybe even less. It was all still new and strange to me, but over the four years I spent there, I don't think I ever saw anything as perfectly Japanese as this, not even the day the Denny's was stuffed with girls in kimono like frat boys in a Volkswagon.

I'd left my office building and was walking away from the train station. Don't remember where I was going--maybe to the Shinto shrine that was a block or two down.

There was, for reasons that never were clear to me, a tiny side street next to my office. Tiny side street, barely enough for a subcompact car to get through without scraping the wing mirrors. And for some reason, this side street, which never, ever had any traffic on it, had a traffic light.

Japanese traffic lights are slow. We once timed one at eight minutes before it changed.

A pretty young girl came running past me, her high heels clicking on the sidewalk. She was hauling, moving just as fast as she could, but when she hit the red light at this tiny side street, she stopped dead. Waited.

Waited.

No car came, of course. You could see way up the street, and it was obvious no car was ever going to come, that this chunk of road would die of sheer solitude and time itself would stop showing up for work before a car came down this side street.

But the girl waited.

And the light didn't change.

Any other day, I would have simply ignored the light and crossed. But I was watching this girl, who was breathing hard from her run, her eyes fixed on the red light.

Three or four minutes went by. Everything moved but us and the completely empty street.

And when the light finally changed, she started running again, like a sprinter out of the blocks.

Maybe that was the day I fell in love with Japan.