Chapter 89
It has already been just over a month since the two were reunited and once again pledged their infinitely stronger... and unwavering love to one another.
At Ryosaku's alma mater, the Agricultural College, the first-year students are about to depart for their agricultural training trip to Hokkaido.
Every year, all first-year students at this school are required to take part in this "Hokkaido Agricultural Training" program, which lasts for about two weeks.
Each student was assigned to a farm by their school as an "agricultural intern," where they lived and ate at the farm and helped with farm work. That was the system.
Hokkaido is a long way away, a vast northern land, from T Prefecture where Ryosaku lives.
This "training trip" did not involve air travel, but instead involved a long, long train journey to the site on the Tohoku Shinkansen and local trains.
Since the school is a prefectural school funded by taxes, there were strict cuts in travel expenses...not even sleeping cars were provided.
In September 1989, a night express train called "Hamanasu" ran from Aomori Station to Sapporo Station through the Seikan Tunnel.
Following the discontinuation of the "Seikan Ferry," this service used passenger cars from regular trains as a sort of "substitute for sleeper cars," and served as a valuable means of transportation between Honshu and Hokkaido by rail until 2016.
As Ryosaku and his group began to pass through the Seikan Tunnel, it was late at night, and the lights in the passenger car they were riding in changed to the orange light of the "night lights"... so Ryosaku and the other passengers decided to take a nap.
This was not a so-called "sleeping car," but rather a regular passenger car used as a substitute for a sleeping car at night, so there were other regular passengers in the car as well, and as the student was sitting behind Ryosaku, he was unable to recline his chair to sleep, nor could he stretch his legs...he was forced to take a nap while remaining in a sitting position in a small space, which was an extremely inconvenient and uncomfortable situation.
Also, because the night lights were on brightly, there were students here and there in the car, mumbling to themselves and refusing to sleep, and for Ryosaku, who usually slept in a quiet environment where he could not hear anyone talking, this night on the night train...was a painful and unpleasant memory, as he was unable to sleep at all.
Thus, without having had enough sleep, and suffering from pain in their shoulders and backs due to being in an unnatural position for so long, Ryosaku and his group set foot in Sapporo Station, the gateway to their internship site.
