A customs officer at the Tokyo airport asked me to come. His screen illuminated my suitcase, where five bottles of vodka were clearly visible.
What there?
and medicines. for me. The Russians.
This is JAPAN! Go by.

So in 1995 I got into a wonderful country. With a variety of Russian nuclear power plant workers. In the early 1990s, the international community, frightened by Chernobyl, paid the Russians for training around the world. That, therefore, they learned the mind there, and no more reactors melted. Minotaur began to fade. In all kinds of United States-Canada, France and Sweden, Moscow officials first took off, then their children, then - friends and secretaries, well, the real practices were only accidental (I was personally offered to go in just a week; I barely had time to put a visa).

The Japanese trip consisted of visits to various nuclear power plants. Going forward, I will say that the technical result turned out to be zero. Aside from discipline, nothing of what we saw would have suited us, and one of us by the way even predicted the possibility of the Fukushima accident, which occurred 16 years later (on that day we lazyly digested lunch, going out to the sea, near the Karavazako-Kariv Station, when someone noticed: "But if a healthy tsunami fucking, it can come shit." The others thought and thought importantly). But I am not about that.

There were two translators with the group. The Japanese are old. Growth from sixth grade. Invisible and working, they alternately did their difficult work. I got along with one of them. So it turned out that after the first three nights of drunkenness I realized that I would die, and bound with vodka without a snack and chorus "Oyya, you oysya" in the hotel room. Immediately I got to sleep, wash, and spend thirty minutes in the lobby, drinking a cool coffee, and considering familiar words in English newspapers. That translator had come earlier and was happy to answer my questions about Japanese life. And I explained to him the terms that were met at the courses. He captured them instantly, and in the afternoon, instead of boring descriptions of unknown words, it shone with "iodine hole" and "Hoyat".

These two, I repeat, were very polite and modest. But sometimes even their restraint failed. We were wild. Especially during the cultural program, when meeting with locals in restaurants, or on weekends went on excursions. The inner rope rolled. I saw when, at some sharp outburst of one of us, for a moment their faces stopped smiling on duty, and for a moment there was an expression of some crazy fatigue. In those morning conversations, I tried to apologize and explain the situation to my Japanese interlocutor. He always agreed.

But one day an incident happened that changed everything. We were taken to some kind of museum, like a landscape. Atomic specialists (under the flies, as usual) roared over the nonsense of the Japanese, who did not invent cotton pants instead of kimono, drank liquid tea from curved cups, and made windows and doors from paper. Rare locals whispered a loud goot. My translator just squeezed his lips. But here we approached the illuminated sheet with hieroglyphs. The translator said that this is a very beautiful example of Japanese poetry. This book was written by the mother of a suddenly dead child. It is very touching, and in translation it sounds like this:

No one is more
Making holes in paper windows.
How cold it is in the house!

Someday it became quiet. I asked to translate again. The people heard what they heard. And then the two-meter-high, loudest and eternally submissive uncle (like from the harsh "Majak") somehow swallowed, shrugged his face, and silently cried.

And in the morning the translator was thoughtful and said something polite, confusing and strange. I just realized that it was not yet lost...