Boarding the Narita Express was, in fact, our first cultural blunder. The train pulled into the station, the doors opened, and all the passengers got off. Ryan and I assumed, naïvely, that we could now board the train. Hah!
We walked aboard and the conductor very politely shooed us back out, offering, by way of explanation, “Clean… clean.” I felt rather vulnerable. Were we too dirty to ride the train? But no, they simply had to clean the train before it began its journey back to the city. Wouldn’t want to send a dirty train out for its run. (And, you know something? When we got back to California, one of the first things I noticed was how dirty the BART cars are.)
It’s at this point that I first started to become seduced by the Japan Rail system, and possibly at this point that Ryan first started to worry about my sanity, because I vaguely recall sitting in my seat on the Narita Express muttering about what a beautiful train it was. In my defense, it is. The seats are black fabric with angled red stripes that evoke something between a racecar and an early video game cabinet. There is ample storage space both above the seats and at the entrance to each car (so we didn’t have to drag our heavy luggage down the aisle). There is a map at the front of the car with blinking LEDs that chart our progress and indicate the remaining travel time. And, of course, it is a very clean train.
The cleanliness, alas, did not prevent our non-smoking car from filling up with smoke from the adjacent cars.
After a pleasant, if smoky, ride of an hour and a half, tracked by LEDs and adhering precisely to the published schedule, our train pulled into Shinjuku Station and it dawned on us that we were in Japan.