“Now just where did you come from?”

August is when summertime domestic travel peaks in Japan. With kids already on vacation from school and working adults getting a few days off, lots of people take the opportunity to go back to their hometowns and visit relatives, or to leave their homes in the big city for a getaway in the countryside, or vice versa.

During this time, the Tokkaido Shinkansen, which connects Tokyo and Osaka and makes stops in Nagoya and Kyoto too, is the busiest bullet train line of them all, so you can expect to see a lot of passengers on it on any given day.

What you wouldn’t expect, though, is for one of those passengers to be a parakeet.

Or maybe we should call the bird a stowaway, since he didn’t have a ticket? But then again, the word “stowaway” usually implies hiding, and the parakeet was blatantly out in the open, perching on the top of a seatback on a Shinkansen train that had just left Kyoto and was heading east for Tokyo.

Japan doesn’t have a wild parakeet population, and uncaged pets aren’t allowed on the Shinkansen, least of all ones that can fly. But while the bird was clearly a pet, further evidenced by how calm and relaxed it was around people, no one on the train was its owner, so how did it get onboard? Even as a member of the Shinkansen’s onboard security staff takes the parakeet into custody with gentle deftness in the video above, he can be heard murmuring “Now just where did you come from?”

It turns out that prior to the train leaving Kyoto Station, the parakeet had swooped down and landed on the backpack of a foreign tourist who was standing on the platform and waiting to board. Apparently the traveler didn’t notice the extra weight, as photos taken inside the train show him onboard with the bird still on his back.

▼ The bird can be seen on the man’s back at the point in the video cued here.

But while that solved the mystery of how the parakeet got on the train, it didn’t provide any clue as to where the bird came from. So the animal remained in the custody of the Shinkansen security staff for the entire 500-kilometer (310.7-mile) journey from Kyoto to Tokyo. After arriving in the capital, the Shinkansen staff turned the bird over to the police, though to its lost property division, not its missing person task force.

The parakeet, being a parakeet, could not provide any answers to police inquiries about its home address. Fortunately, though, as the heartwarmingly silly video of the Shinkansen parakeet was giving the Japanese Internet a chuckle, it also gave one women in Kyoto hope. This woman’s pet parakeet had run/flown off on August 7 and hadn’t returned home, but it looked a lot like the bird on the train, with the same colorings to its feathers.

The woman then got in touch with the Tokyo police, and pet and owner have now been safest reunited (sadly, it’s unclear if the bird got to take another Shinkansen ride back to Kyoto, or if it made the return trip by more mundane means. The owner says she’ll be taking more care deciding whether or not to let the parakeet fly freely throughout here home, with no cage, as that unfettered flying freedom seems to have been a contributing factor in its escape, and thanked all of the Twitter users who’d brought the Shinkansen images to her attention.

Meanwhile, this is a reminder for all of us that before getting on the Shinkansen it’s always a good idea to check your bags, not just to make sure you’re not forgetting anything, but also that you’re not inadvertently sneaking anyone onboard.

Source: FNN Prime Online
Top image: Pakutaso
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