2:15pm local We arrived in Hachinohoe at 1:55pm. I took care of business and headed for the reservation desk. At 1:59 I was issued a seat reservation to Tokyo... train leaving at 2:04pm! For some reason they keep giving me tickets in Japanese instead of English. I know they can do both because one clerk said "oops" or the Japanese equivalent and reissued me another ticket in English. So the speed at which I had to get to the train took a few seconds to sink in. Since I'm going first class I had to jog the entire way to the end of the train to the Green (1st class) car. I didn't want to go almost 3hrs without a drink, so I gambled by stopping at one of the ubiquitous vending machines found here in Japan. The first coin I grabbed was a 500