In two days I will be in Yoyogi park in the afternoon Tokyo sun. Of the dozen foreigners in our group several are carrying their passports, a few have emergency backpacks, and nearly all will have left Tokyo before a week has passed, some for good. I will join a group under a tree and use my own shoes to try and dislodge a stranger`s shoe from a branch and I will realise how unfit my stiff body is from the kicking it took walking 30km two days before.
The sun begins to fade into late afternoon and a chill wind picks up as we walk. Fifteen minutes of slow walking and the Chinese girl is delivered to the next station. Helpless, she is familiar with the act, and chose the tea salesman with a purpose maybe she does not know herself. I tell her I`ll buy her a coffee and donut but she says her goodbyes. When she leaves the tea man turns to me and says She is married, she has a ring.
The donut shop, like everywhere around the stations, is full of the stranded, but we do find somewhere else to eat.
He has beef on rice and I have tonkatsu on rice. A new tremor comes. Walking we`d felt none. It is a comfortable gyration. One woman goes out then comes back in. Most do nothing. The place is full and the salesman talks in good humour to a table of school girls adjacent. I see a white man for the first time today, alone and with a beer, but we don`t talk because our gang was already made
