As I was driving to a lesson this afternoon, I saw a young Japanese woman walking down the street and immediately I thought something was completely out of whack. As I continued down the road, glancing at her retreating form in my rearview mirror, my mind was trying to piece together the facts to determine what’s wrong with this picture. She was a couple inches taller than the average Japanese woman, but not tall enough to be considered unusual. So what was it?
A couple kilometers further up the road, after passing several “normal” Japanese pedestrians, it clicked. That woman wasn’t carrying anything. Nothing. Not a purse, or a messenger bag, or a backpack, or a kid. No groceries, no coffee in a can, no flowers. No appointment book, no iPod, no cell phone (gasp!). She didn’t have a dog leash in her hand or an umbrella on her arm. This woman was completely “naked.” It dawned on me that in eleven months of living here, I have not seen a single person—man, woman, or child, young or old—who was not carrying something. How very, very strange.
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