My wife and I, both being office workers, use a station near our house to take a local train that connects to JR’s Tokyo-bound trains at the local hub station.  

“This type of train is excessively air-conditioned, isn’t it?”
“I’ve never noticed a house like that over there.”

While we were having chitchats like these one morning on the train, I happened to notice a grasshopper desperately clinging to the outer side of the train window. It apparently was trying to survive the hardship with its head turned in the direction of the train to minimize the headwind pressure. Its frontal antennae, which sticked longer than its body, were on the brink of being torn apart as the wind was pulling them backward.

“Does it seem to be having fun?”
“No way. It must be having a fear.”

“Does it have a brain for feeling a sense of horror?”
“Well, I wonder what it is thinking now.”

“What a strange landscape!” “The speed is so damaging.”
“It seems to be suffering as it has lost one of its feet.”

As we continued increasingly meaningless conversation, we became more focused on talking about what the grasshopper was seeing and how it was feeling the situation.

“Look!”

As the train was about to arrive next to the terminal station, the grasshopper flied away as if to fall off the window.

We didn’t know whether it intentionally left or simply fell off. Grasshoppers have their own world, which we humans can’t understand. Then I came to realize countless different worlds exist around us.

Talking about the world and universe, I wonder which one implies vaster space?”

Kentaro Hayase
Context Design Dept.
Senior Director