During elementary school, when I was in sixth grade, my whole family went to watch a baseball game at the stadium. I wasn’t particularly interested in baseball, but I was shocked once we got there. There were people everywhere I looked. The ones on the other side of the stadium looked like squirming grains of rice packed together. I wondered if every last person in Japan attended this game. And so, I asked my dad, exactly how many people were in the stadium? His answer was that a sold-out game meant around fifty thousand people. After the game, the path to the train station was flooded with people. The sight stunned me. So many people around me, yet they only made up a fraction of the people in Japan. Once I got home, I got a calculator and did the math. I had learned in social studies that the Japanese population was a hundred million and some. Divide fifty thousand into that and you only get one two-thousandth. I was stunned again. Not only was I just one little person in that sea of people in that stadium, but that sea of people was merely a drop in the ocean. I had thought myself to be a special person up until that point. I enjoyed being with my family, and most of all, I thought that my class in school had the most interesting people in the world. That was when I realized it wasn’t like that. The things that happened in what I believed to be the most enjoyable class in the world could be found happening in any school in Japan. Everyone in Japan would find them to be ordinary. Once I realized this, I found that my surroundings were beginning to lose their color. Brush my teeth and go to sleep at night. Wake up and eat breakfast in the morning. People do those things everywhere. When I realized that everyone did all these things on a daily basis, everything started to feel so boring. And if there were so many people in the world, there had to be someone living an interesting life that wasn’t ordinary. I was sure of it. Why wasn’t that person me?
