Lost and found, after a quick lap around Tokyo

 

We were trying to go to Costco. We had a backpack with a cooler pouch inside to bring a few of the groceries home. Jim put his Japanese text book in the bag, too, to maybe study on the ride back. On the Yamanote train, he put the bag up on the rack over the seats and said to remind him to take it on the way out. I said sure. A few minutes later, we got off the train at Shinagawa, went upstairs and through the wickets to our next train, and realized we'd left the bag behind.

The stolid man in the platform office made a few calls to see if someone at another station could pop aboard and look for it. We had retraced our steps and were able to tell him which car, which door and which side we'd left it on. But the train was running seven minutes behind schedule, so they wouldn't be able to do any checking until the train stopped for the night in Ikebukuro. He said it would just loop around and around for the next five hours. He said we could wait until the same train came back through the station, in forty or forty-five minutes. Or, we could wait until the next day then call the number on the card he gave us and see where in the train system, if anywhere, the bag had turned up. With that, he looked down, started shuffling paperwork and was done with us.

We went back on the platform to where we'd gotten off before and watched as lime green train after train pulled up, each stopping at exactly the same spot, each papered with the same combination of iced tea ads in the same frames around the priority seats, all with empty overhead racks. 

It was an outdoor track on a pleasant evening, and the ridiculousness of the situation overshadowed the annoyance of it. Right around the 42-minute mark, almost exactly an hour since we'd abandoned the bag, a train pulled up with the backpack sitting where we left it, untouched.  Jim grabbed it, and we hopped into the train on the other side of the platform and went back home.

I really didn't want to go to Costco, anyway.