29

Now, back when I was an elementary schooler, we still had class on Saturdays, but currently I’m pretty sure that’s only relegated to a select few private schools. It’s been almost 20 years, so I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that while I was in junior high, a newly established law gave us every second and fourth Saturday off. Looking back, that was probably the implementation of the infamous “Yutori Education Policy” that reduced primary school curriculum hours and requirements. Then, right around the time of this story, 2001, full two-day weekends were being established as the norm. Two-day weekends basically means two Sundays every week, and when I put it that way, it almost feels like too much time off. Like the week itself is getting shorter…

But I recently had the pleasure of interviewing a teacher currently in the education industry, and they insisted that the effects of Yutori Education weren’t all that extreme. The things I had previously heard about Yutori Education were almost on the level of urban legend, like students learning that pi was just a number somewhere around 3. I guess in general, societal change ends up being conveyed in exaggerated ways to people that aren’t directly affected by it, so rumors and misunderstandings abound.

Well, there I went off on an unimportant tangent again.

Basically, it was Saturday, so U wouldn’t be going to school… I got a pretty big shock when I first realized that, but it wasn’t all that big a deal. I had plenty of time. I just had to wait out Saturday and Sunday for my big opportunity on Monday. Writing that now, I have to wonder how long I was planning on staying at the U household. What started as one night was turning into quite the drawn-out affair. I’d gone from a kidnapping victim to essentially a weirdo freeloader. I didn’t think of myself as a weirdo at the time, but only because I had just gotten used to it. Well, more accurately, I acclimated to my environment.

But I can’t change my thought process from a decade ago. That was what I had thought, and I began making plans for how to spend Saturday and Sunday.

It wasn’t about spending the time any particular way, since all I could do was sit and wait in the closet. My very simple conundrum had to do with food.

Without going to school, U wouldn’t be bringing home lunches… which meant we had two days of fasting ahead of us. That would be tough for me, let alone U. I had no idea what she had done the weekend before, whether her parents had already “gone” at that point or not, but an improvement in diet would be necessary not just that weekend, but in the following week, both for U and I.

So we come to Saturday, in the early morning hours of my fourth day of confinement.

I pulled out my socks that I had taken off and tucked away in a corner of the closet on my first day of imprisonment, taking out a 10,000-yen note that I had tucked inside one of them, folded and pressed away as tightly as possible.¹

I’m trying to think back on whether the new 10,000 yen bill had been issued at that point, or if we were still using the old print. Maybe I can use the 2,000 yen bill for reference… whoops, talk about unimportant rabbit trails.

You might not be willing to believe this of a man currently making himself comfortable in his place of confinement, but I’m a very cautious, or more precisely anxious, person. Even on a normal trip to school, I would have cash on me in all sorts of places, as if I were taking a trip abroad. The bill tucked away in my sock was an emergency reserve in case my wallet and/or bag were dropped, lost, or stolen.

Of course, I had been a hundred percent certain that I would never make use of any of the cash that I secretly tucked away… yet there I was, in the perfect time and place to use it. Life truly is unpredictable.

And so, the time had come for me to make use of my 10,000-yen bill.

I had been brought to the house at knifepoint with nothing but a cell phone, keys, the bill, and the clothes on my back. But I knew exactly how to use the cash.

Unfortunately, even though my opportunity to use it had come, I couldn’t be the one to use it. As a kidnapped person, I had to stay in the house.

Which meant, of course…

“Good morning to you.”

With perfect timing, U walked up to the closet door, evidently having woken up at 7 AM despite it being a day off school. I returned her morning greeting, then relayed that I had a favor to ask of her.

“…”

U was silent for a while, but I continued to press her, undeterred by her silence (you’d be surprised what a shy person like me can do when lives are on the line, especially when mine is one of them). Eventually, U caved.

“…”

She wordlessly opened the closet door. As always, her knife was pointed at me.

I unfolded the crumpled-up 10,000-yen bill, handing it to her.

There was no point in trying to smooth-talk her. Bargaining and trickery were out of the question by then, especially with an elementary schooler. If all I did was dance around the topic, then we’d never get anywhere.

But on the other hand, being too straightforward with her could also backfire. Like when I complained about my hunger, and she responded to the extreme by giving me all of her food.

A balance was necessary, but for the time being, I decided to shoot straight with her.

I asked U to take the bill to the convenience store and buy stuff that I would list out to her.

Asking a child to run my errands is pathetic from any angle, but it was the best option I could see at the time. But man, how long would it take to get through my thick skull that getting the heck outta Dodge was the actual best option for me?

I really can’t remember what it was like to be her age any more (once you hit 30, you start losing memories from your teens, I don’t care how good your memory is), but I could recall being in elementary school more clearly as a 20-year-old, and I remembered being able to go shopping by myself at that age. That made asking U to do the shopping a bit more realistic as far as plans went.

Of course, we didn’t have nearly as many convenience stores back when I was a fourth-year elementary schooler… but that’s the nature of things becoming more convenient. We could even plan around shopping that early in the morning, when most supermarkets would only open around 10 AM. That really made me realize what convenient times we lived in back then. Even more so now.

I didn’t know the exact location of U‘s house, but I was sure there had to be a convenience store reasonably close by. There had to have been a Lawson’s or 7-Eleven at the crossroads where the accident happened, which would’ve been… about halfway between her house and school, maybe? There had to be one somewhere, probably even closer than that.

But then, I faced an unexpected turn of events.

U did not know what a 10,000-yen bill was.

She only knew about the coins, like 1s, 5s, 10s, 50s, 100s, and 500s. The most valuable currency she knew about was a 1000-yen bill. She didn’t know about 5,000 or 10,000 bills… As I reluctantly accepted reality, I began desperately explaining that the single piece of paper I held was worth ten 1,000-yen bills, or a hundred 100-yen coins.

Without knowing value, currency becomes little more than pieces of paper. When traveling abroad, foreign currencies never seem to feel as powerful, but that has less to do with any one country’s minting system and more to do with an innate knowledge of the currency’s value. It’s like not knowing the value of a collector’s item.

As far as U was concerned, the 10,000-yen bill in my hands was no more valuable than the paper money in her Game of Life board game. I couldn’t handle the thought of my precious nest egg, the last remaining asset to my name, being tossed out with that mess of a living room.

After my exhaustive (and desperate) explanations, U finally seemed to accept that the bill was real money. I can’t think of a better example of the difficulties of conveying value to another person… But after finally clearing that hurdle, the next step was figuring out what I wanted U to buy.

From a health and wellness perspective, cooking fresh ingredients like vegetables and meat would be better than getting ready-made or instant meals… besides, the house had a nice kitchen, if a little messy, and the fridge looked like it could hold almost infinite food.

But even ignoring that I was already paying for groceries, asking a kidnapped guy to cook was going a bit too far. Or at least, I felt like it was a bit too far. There was no real standard, so I was just making that up, but as far as I was concerned, I didn’t feel right asking U to buy things that would then require further prep on her end.

Besides, I didn’t think U could cook… not that I was any kind of chef myself. I would say I was pretty average at cooking for a university student living alone, but no matter what kind of ingredients I bought, I probably couldn’t do any better than curry or just throwing ingredients into a pot… Either way, I ended up asking U to mainly buy things like instant noodles and frozen foods.

In particular, foods that could be stored for long periods of time.

“…”

At first, U was trying to memorize everything I wanted her to buy all at once, but about halfway through, she seemed to give up on that goal.

“Please wait,” she said, making her way upstairs.

But she forgot to close the closet door… I’m not just saying she forgot to lock it, the door remained wide open as she went upstairs.

She even left her knife on the ground.

Talk about careless… I know, it sounds a bit weird for someone in my situation to criticize her. But what would that make me as a kidnapped person if I refused to take advantage of my kidnapper’s careless mistake? Would it be too pretentious? I wondered what to do, as in, should I pretend to be trying to escape, but either way, U came thumping back down the stairs with heavy steps before I made up my mind.

She was running so fast down the stairs it almost sounded like she was falling down them, and it felt pretty dangerous. She must have realized she forgot to close the door while on the second floor, probably in her room. With a start, she picked up the knife, as if she had only just remembered that it was there, too.

Then she gave me a vicious glare, as if it was all my fault. But, glare or not, all I could do was look at her in confusion, like I didn’t notice anything had gone wrong.

One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned over the past decade in the work force is that the trick to meshing with society is to pretend not to notice other people’s mistakes. But thinking back, I guess I had already learned that much without being tested in the societal workplace.

You might be wondering what exactly U was going upstairs for, risking that big blunder. Well, she had come downstairs with a notebook in her hands.

The notebook had “free use” written across the cover. I can’t quite remember if it was in adult kanji or children’s hiragana, but it was the kind of free-use notebook that I’m sure everyone had as a kid.

And also a pencil.

It seemed that she planned on writing a list, since she couldn’t remember everything in her head… which was not only the right course of action, but something I should have taken into consideration in the first place. It was a bit ridiculous of me to expect such a little girl to memorize a hundred dollars’ worth of shopping.

I had been worried about making an elementary schooler do my shopping, but if she was taking a list with her, then that alleviated my concerns. She might even be able to show the list to a cashier and have everything gathered for her… granted, it might be hard to find an average cashier that kind, but she was a little elementary school girl on a shopping errand as far as they were concerned. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask.

Since she was taking notes, I figured it’d be okay to increase the variety of items, so I changed up the list a bit.

Looking back, I can’t help but regret that decision.

It was a logical, adult decision to change up the quantity and variety of groceries since I had the freedom of a list. More to the point, it was the logic of a man who had the body and strength of a man. But I never considered the body and strength of U, the one who actually had to carry everything home. It was an amount that wasn’t impossible for her to manage, but would be surprising to see her pull off. An elementary schooler would have a heck of a time hauling it all in from the convenience store.

I thought I was having a good idea, but I was too self-centered. I felt kinda bad about giving her so much stuff that would require extra trips, but that empathy was focused on the entirely wrong problem.

“Very well, then. I am leaving now.”

After finishing her notes (in handwriting that was really bad, to be completely honest), U stood up.

She had held on to her knife the whole time, keeping it by her side in one hand with her pencil in the other. It wasn’t that U was slipping up in general mannerisms, but rather that the fine details of my confinement were beginning to outpace her. She was making simple mistakes, like forgetting to close the door earlier.

In a way, I could get it. We were on the fourth day of my imprisonment. It was hard on me, but equally as hard on U. Keeping a living creature is no simple task. Kids have a hard enough time truly caring for a cat or a dog, and “taking responsibility” for a human is just beyond the scope of any elementary schooler’s capabilities.

Maybe giving me all of her lunch came from a sense of responsibility, but by the fourth day, her sense of responsibility was becoming very strained. At least, that’s what I figured at the time.

Perhaps the greatest kindness I could have shown her was escaping as quickly as possible. I can see that now as a 30-year-old, but back then, I just watched as she slipped further and further, figuring kids would be kids.

I suppose I just assumed I had to be the “victim”. I was the victim, and U was the “perpetrator”. Maybe I assumed that victims were always suffering, and perpetrators weren’t… But victim or not, I should’ve been aware of who was the adult and who was the child.

But I wasn’t aware, and I blithely watched U leave, saying I’d see her when she got back.

Footnotes

¹ A 10,000 yen bill is the Japanese equivalent of the $100 bill. return