Big Trouble in Little... Post Office

  

"I've created problems in this peaceful town.  My work is done here."
~ excerpt from a LINE chat between EpicGaijinSmash and Tim Villain

 

April 2, 2014 

It's another day during spring break.  Tim Villain and I decided to visit our friend in a small town north of Miyako, and have some Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki (it's like a pancake with veggies, noodles, egg, meat stacked and cooked on a flat grill).  We took a half hour ride on the quaint little train, like the one in Ama-chan (a popular 2013 drama which took place here in Iwate Prefecture).  After a satisfactory meal, I decided to go to the post office for some personal business.  And, that's when things got real.

  
 

I needed to add more pages to my passport.  To pay for it, I had to send in a 国際郵便為替 [kok-sai-yu-bin-ka-wa-se], or an international postal money order.  I asked for one at the counter, and my request was returned with a bunch of fast official-sounding Japanese that I couldn't understand.  Luckily, my friend was there to help.  However, that quickly spiraled out of control.  After the post office clerks researched their manuals and discussed amongst themselves for a long time, they called their HQ.  Within minutes, half a dozen black SUVs pulled up, and mysterious men wrestled me and my friend away to an abandoned warehouse. They relentlessly interrogated us on why we were getting a money order and what we were planning with it.  After what seemed like hours, they had us chained to the wall and our pants down to our ankles.

 

Suddenly, sirens blared from all directions.  Our mysterious captors scrambled into overdrive, as the floor under us opened up and the walls shifted.  Once again, my friend and I were wrestled away, this time to an elevator which led somewhere deep underground.  For a second, I saw a gigantic humanoid figure over the skyline, which later our captors called an Angel.  At the end of a long elevator ride, we were met by more mysterious men and a young boy named Shinji.  Immediately, they told the boy that he needed to "get back into the Eva and save the city".  He insisted that he couldn't, and what looked like paternal abandonment issues threw him into a fit of uncontrollable rage.  Then, a white girl with orange-brown hair and a red jumpsuit appeared, and slapped the boy hard across the face.  That was the last time my friend and I saw the boy and girl.

 

During our endless shuffling around the sprawling underground complex, the crisis was averted.  I believe the boy from earlier overcame his inner demons and saved the city.  Later, the mysterious men kindly took my friend and me back to the little post office.  The same clerk from the start of this encounter handed me a form, which I had to redo a few times due to various mistakes on my part.  Within minutes, I was given a money order to include with my passport and documents.  The clerk was nice enough to drop it off with the day's outgoing mail, and even thanked me by giving me 2 Kumamon (the mascot of Kumamoto Prefecture) face towels!

 

All the while, Tim Villain was waiting in our friend's car outside the little post office.

 

Afterwards, we went to a free foot bath and had dessert.  Mine was a mango mousse cake.

 

 

Moral of the story:

     Don't ask for silly weird things, like an international money order, at a small town post office.