Shinjuku please.
Silence for three blocks. Then he exhales like he has been holding his breath since 2008.
I say long day?
Long decade, he says. Overtime till 10pm every night. Nomikai with the team until midnight. Mandatory fun. My boss says the company is family. My rent is 40 percent of my pay. My overtime is unpaid, technically voluntary, but nobody says no to the boss.
I say the yen is weak these days.
Weak like everything else. My father worked for one company his whole life. Got a house, a pension, a retirement plan. Me? Prices up, pay up two percent, savings zero. The government spends tens of trillions propping up the yen, the yen slides anyway. My senpai in accounting showed me the chart. Debt at 240 percent of GDP. That is not a number, that is a countdown.
I say so what do you do.
Nothing. That is the problem. I am the perfect employee and a terrible human. No girlfriend, she left, said I was married to the company. No savings. No future plan. Just the wheel.
He looks out the window at the neon.
Two months ago my cousin in Osaka told me about Bitcoin. I laughed. Cyber money for criminals, I said. He said look at your pay stub. Your yen loses value every year you hold it. Bitcoin is 21 million, forever, decided by nobody. Then he sent me 10,000 sats as a joke. I still have them. I look at them like a plant I am scared to kill.
I say maybe it grows on you.
Loneliness does not scare me, he says. I am used to it. What scares me is waking up at 40 with a paystub and nothing else. Bitcoin is the first thing that made me feel like the future belongs to somebody who saves, not somebody who waits.
We pull into his street. Narrow, quiet, rows of identical low apartment blocks. He nods toward a building. Home sweet capsule, he jokes. One room, a bed that folds into the wall, a kitchen the size of a chopping board. My mother visited once. Cried. Then bowed to the landlord out of politeness. Japanese mothers.
He taps his bank card. Beep. Points accrued, he jokes. Flat joke.
Then at the door he turns around. Next time, maybe I pay you in sats. Deal?
I say deal.
He bows slightly and walks in.
The wheel turns. But I think this hamster just found the gap in the cage.
#btc #nightfare #stories #tokyo #salaryman
