Diary entry #1 - A day in life

I am not having a great time, to be honest.

At the edge of my twenties (the upper edge, just to be clear) I am feeling a little bit lost in life.

I have been thinking about a career change for a while, but did not manage to find a path that I would like to follow. Honestly, I don´t want to work anymore..well I guess not many of us do, but we have to. To survive, to fill our days with something at least remotely meaningful and don´t let me forget, for the visa if you are a foreigner living in Japan.

I have been working in Tokyo for almost four years now. Sounds like a long time now that I look at it in retrospect. To be fair, two of those four were the “covid years” so I hope was can just agree not to count them. I have always wanted to write about my life here but well.. life was happening and I never actually managed to do so. But now is finally the time.

They say “write what you know”, so writing about my daily life might be a good way to start, right?

It was your usual Wednesday and I took the train to work. I take the Yamanote line, which connects all the main train station in central Tokyo. It can get quite busy, but as the people get on and off on every station, it is not as bad as the lines from outside of Tokyo to the main commercial and business areas in the mornings. (I will talk about the commuter hell sometime in the near future.)

I made it to work just in time to grab a coffee and settle at my desk before the official start of the work hours. I work as a Japanese company, and every morning, we all stand up next to our desks for a morning assembly, or “chorei“, in Japanese.

Every day, a different employee leads the morning assembly. First, we would recite the motto and principles of our company (to be honest it feels a little religious-sect-ish to me), then go through the current sales numbers, announcements and finally the employee will have their little speech in front of everyone. It can be about anything really, a book or an article they read, something interesting that happened to them recently or introducing one of their new clients.

Afterwards, we continue with the department chorei, where the department head would once again go through the sales numbers, let us know how many business days we have left this month, highlight some good and bad things that have happened the day before and then try to motivate everyone for the day.

And then finally a team chorei, where we go through our plans for the day and team-related announcements. The good thing is that for the team one we can at least sit down. The not so good thing is that these assemblies can take up to 30 minutes. I am sure that people who get motivated by this at the beginning of their day exist, but to be honest I am not one of them.

It was quite a tough day at work. I don´t think I can go into details, but at 7pm when my day was over, I was exhausted and just wanted to get home as soon as possible. I got on the Yamanote line train, managed to sit down on the next station and just as we passed Shibuya, the emergency break has been pulled.

The train came to a sudden stop and the people who were not holding on to anything were falling over like dominos. But luckily (?) the train was so packed that nobody actually fell over. The announcement told us that there has been a “jinshinjikou“ – an accident resulting in an injury or death at the Shibuya station.

What works the best if you want to find our current train situation in Tokyo is to go to Twitter. Just look up the name of the station or train line you want to know, go to the most recent posts and you will get real-time information in Japanese.

So I had a look and found out that unfortunately..somebody jumped. A shiver run down my spine as I was reading the tweets in which people were extremely annoyed at that person because it inconvenienced their way home from work.

I get it, I wanted to get home too and was not in the mood to be stuck on an unmoving train, but I do find it sad that people would swear at a person who was at a point in their life where they felt death was the only option. But I guess that is twitter for you and it is very easy to say insensitive things when you are hiding behind a username.

The train finally made it to the nearest station and most people got off looking for alternative routes to get home - other train lines or a taxi. I sat on the train pondering my options and with about 2% of battery left on my phone, I opted to also get home through a different train route. This proved to be a good decision since the train I was on did not move for the next 30 minutes.

I was walking home in silence, which I have not done in a while. I would always listen to podcasts, music or talk with someone on the phone (mostly my mom). It was a good time to go deep into my thoughts, about why I am feeling a bit stuck in life, about things that are currently glooming over me, making me feel so down. In the end, even though I am feeling pretty low right now, I am a strong believer in “As long as you are alive, things can get better”.

So here is a little note in case anyone is reading this and is in a bit of a tough spot in life – just hold on for now. Because as long as you are here, there is a chance for the future you have dreamed of.

And maybe one more reminder. Let’s look out for the people close to us and around us. We never know, what they might be going through and sometimes the smallest things can change their lives for the better.

I am going to end this entry here, but hope that I will finally start writing more from hereon.

Anyways, to whoever is reading this and got to the end – I hope you have a lovely day! :)