Tokyo Times

A rather pensive wait, but one that quite possibly was almost over.

Living and working in Tokyo, the city’s immense train network is both an incredible convenience and a horrible necessity. You can reliably get almost anywhere in the capital, but the major problem is you have to do so with countless millions of other passengers. And it regularly gets so busy that individual stations feel like they are actually filled with each and every one of those many travellers.

In Hokkaido, however, it’s a very different story.

The trains are hours apart, rather than minutes, and even then there are few, if indeed any, passengers. So local stations are invariably deserted, which makes visiting them a slightly odd experience. A world where the lights are still on, but the inhabitants have all inexplicably disappeared.

It’s now just a comfortable train journey from Tokyo to Hokkaido, but Japan’s northernmost main island rather wonderfully feels like a whole other world compared to the congestion of the capital.

Zen and the art of managing train commutes?

The missing little finger strongly suggests that this man was once a member of the yakuza, and his current predicament may also suggest that the reason for losing said digit eventually resulted in him losing an awful lot more.