Catching the train back to town on the second afternoon, I noticed a lone schoolgirl fixing her socks. She was probably coming back from bukatsu which ran the entire year, even through the week of public holidays. She was wearing ruusu sokusu, or ‘loose socks,’ which are long white socks with all the elastic plucked out so that they fall down around the ankles. The effect of this wouldn’t be too different from what we did at school, but they pull the sock up part way and glue it to their leg to create a lumpy white vase. It occurred to me that I’d never seen any of these girls fixing their socks before. Perhaps I did today because the train was empty, or perhaps because I was thinking about fashion. Whatever the reason, today I noticed as she pulled the socks down, plumped them out nicely, and applied a liberal coat of glue stick in a ring below her knee before pulling the sock up again. She then did the same for the other leg, but apparently they didn’t match because she studied them for half a minute, and repeated the process. I watched as she did this three times during the ten-minute journey into town, seemingly oblivious of her audience, or perhaps acting up to it.