Slides That Follow Your Voice: Japanese Accent Retirement Speech

Slide 1: Forty-one years on the Hanamori line

0:17Thank you. Please, sit down. I was told I have ten minutes, and in forty-one years I have never once finished an inspection in the time allowed, so I would ask the section chief to be patient one last time. [chuckles]

0:32I joined this company on the first of April, nineteen eighty-five, as a track maintenance trainee on the Hanamori line. On my first night, the foreman, Mr Okabe, who some of you still remember, handed me a uh, a gauge, a hammer and a torch, and told me that the railway had two kinds of people: those who had walked the track at night, and those who talked about it. He then walked me eleven kilometres in the rain without saying another word.

Slide 2: Two kinds of railway people

1:01I have thought about that walk, I think, once a week, think, once a week for forty-one years. I do not know why it stayed. Maybe the rain.

1:15Most of what I know, I learned with my feet. A rail that is about to fail does not look different. It sounds different, under the hammer, a quarter-tone lower, and it feels different through the sole of a boot, a kind of give in the how do you say, the ballast that is not there the next morning when the engineers arrive with instruments.

Slide 3: Learned with my feet

1:37The instruments are better now. They are very good. In my experience they have never been wrong in a way that a tired man at three in the morning was not also wrong. But they do not get cold, and they do not get bored, and I have learned to respect that.

1:53I want to mention three nights. The first was in August nineteen ninety-four, when the rail temperature on the Kuromine curve reached fifty-six, no, fifty-eight degrees and the track began to buckle, and six of us held it with jacks and water for four hours until the sun went down.

Slide 4: Three nights

2:12I should say, the water came from a rice field beside the line. We asked the farmer. He said yes, and then he came and helped, and his wife brought food, and so the track was saved by six railwaymen and two farmers, and the report names only the railwaymen. I have always regretted that. I tried to change the report once. It was not possible. Anyway.

2:37The second was in two thousand and three, when I found a crack of two millimetres in a fishplate at kilometre forty-seven point three, and the section chief at the time, who did not like me, stopped the first train anyway, because that is what you do.

2:52The third, the last, the... The third night, I will not describe. Everyone on this floor knows which one it was. [sighs]

3:02I will only say that the line reopened in nineteen days, and that I have never been prouder of a group of people, and that most of them are in this room.

Slide 5: Trainees: 34 people

3:14I have trained thirty-four people. Eleven of them now outrank me, which I think is the correct outcome. One of them, Ms Sato, is the first woman to lead a night maintenance section on this railway, and she has done it for six years, and the track under her care has had zero speed restrictions for the last fourteen months, which I never managed, and which I mention so that nobody here thinks the old way was the only way.

3:41What will I do. My wife has a list. It begins with the garden and I suspect it ends with the garden. I have promised not to inspect the garden path with a hammer. She is here. She is shaking her head. I think the gauge is also on the list, near the top, and I think I have already lost, which is, I think, how thirty-eight years of marriage are supposed to go. I wanted to say something else about the garden. It has gone. Excuse me.

Slide 6: What will I do

4:12To the trainees at the back, I will say what Mr Okabe said to me, and nothing more, because he was right and I cannot improve it. Walk the track. At night. In the rain, if possible. Everything else, you will learn from the rail.

Slide 7: To the trainees at the back

4:29Thank you for forty-one years. The five fifty to Kuromine leaves in twenty minutes, and for the first time in my life I will be on it as a passenger. Mr Okabe, wherever you are, I checked the platform on my way in. The gauge was in my pocket. I am sorry. I will try harder on the way home. Excuse me. That is all.