Nagasaki study abroad student takes wrong bus route while exploring Japan
By Julian Macalma ’23, USAC Nagasaki
For a few of my University Studies Abroad Consortium (USAC) study abroad classes, we were assigned to go to a few historically significant places in Japan, including the Nagasaki Peace Park and Oira Oura Cathedral. Naturally, I had pushed this assignment back to the last weekend before the pictures were due, and I scrambled to meet the deadline.
This assignment took me across the whole of Nagasaki, bringing me to quite interesting places that I would’ve otherwise not visited, like the Confucian Temple, for example. The trip included hours of bus rides. Navigation through the bus system in Nagasaki is quite simple, presuming you have your phone and internet connection with you at all times. What busses you need to take and at what time, can usually be found with a GPS app. However, I would soon find out these apps aren’t always infallible.
The morning I ventured out, I made sure to charge my phone up. But, over the course of my trip, I inevitably used my phone in between bus rides and drained my battery quickly. By the time I reached my last destination, it was nearly dead. With no other option, I was forced to memorize the route and bus information I needed to get home.
Memorizing that information was no simple task. I had barely gone through the motions of kanji study, and the symbols were totally foreign to me. Visual navigation was a bust, too, as it was already nearly pitch dark. As I waited at the bus stop, frantically trying to imprint the way home in my mind, a bus pulled up. It was going the right way and looked like the right route! I was in luck!
For about 10 minutes, everything was going smoothly; my phone hadn’t died yet, and the bus followed the required route back home, as according to the GPS. I was confident that I did indeed make the right decision, and eventually, my phone did end up dying. As the minutes wore on, I spaced out for a while, as there wasn’t exactly much of a view since night had settled in.
My relaxation was disrupted, however, when I noticed we had entered a tunnel, and had been going through it for quite some time. On the trip there, we hadn’t gone through a tunnel at all. This route was supposed to simple be a reverse of that route. I sprang up and pushed the button to get off the bus at the next stop. I realized I had made a big mistake.
The bus stopped, and I hesitated to get off for a moment: I saw no lights, or open stores. I took a deep breath and decided there was nothing else to do but leave the bus and start walking. I hoped that I would run into someone who would be friendly enough to help me, a stranger with barely a grasp on the Japanese language.
I already knew the safety of Japan by this point and I wasn’t too concerned with running into less-than-friendly people. Nevertheless, this was extremely nerve-wrecking walk in the dark.
After some time, I saw the lights of a convenience store and quickened my pace towards the entrance. I was saved!
It only took a moment for me to realize that I was in a foreign country and had to figure out how to ask for help in Japanese. By the time I reached the clerk, I managed to say one thing:
“Hello, on the way home, I have taken the wrong bus, and my phone has lost it’s charge; can you tell me which bus I should take to go home?”
Immediately, the worker looked at me befuddled. Did I say everything right, or did I just downright same something incomprehensible? Frantically, I continued with a couple more sentences, explaining that I had no idea where I was, and I lived in Nagasaki.
Thankfully, another clerk was there. After overhearing my requests, he offered to charge my phone. Having a short chat while waiting for the battery to charge, they seemed quite entertained when I blamed Siri for tricking me into getting onto the wrong bus. Lacking the crutch of having a translator or digital dictionary on hand, these interactions required me to apply all of my Japanese language studies that I had up to that point.
Eventually, my phone was charged and turned back on. I quickly went into my GPS app and, to my shock, I saw that the bus took me a whole town over, 40 minutes away from Nagasaki. Now with the way back home in hand, I thanked both of the clerks for their patience.
Normally, one would hope to be prepared for such predicaments, especially in a totally foreign country. Inevitably, however, unexpected things will come — be it positive or negative. Nagasaki isn’t an area where one should expect to just run into someone that could speak your native language. Had I not had at least a small amount of understanding Japanese by that point, this entire situation would have been a total nightmare.
After this escapade, I always made sure to keep my phone totally topped up before a trip and went out of my way to learn grammar and words that I felt that I needed should something similar ever happen again.
