Seki stalker

While a lot has happened since I last wrote (going to Utah for Christmas, seeing family and friends, New Years, having my friends Russ and Katie stay with me here for a few days), I feel like the most interesting thing to write about is our stalker. Russ decided he wanted a knife made in a small city norh of mine- apparently, they are world-famous for their cutlery/swords, so we decided to make the trip to Seki. According to the map, it should have taken us about 40 minutes by train to get there, but the slow holiday train schedule combined with our consistently missing those trains by a few minutes led to about a 3 hour trip. When we arrived at the Mino-Ohta station, we were expecting to just hop on the next train to Seki. Unfortunately, the next one was an hour and a half later. When we were checking the schedule in the station, we noticed this man in a large down jacket and holding a bag with unknown contents, just staring at us. And smiling. At first, we didn't think too much of it- Russ is a really tall white guy and Katie has blonde hair. We get stared at a lot. Because we had so much time, we thought we would just walk around Mino city to keep us busy. As we left the station, we realized that the man was following us. We stopped at every map we saw and pretended to look (even though everything was in Japanese) and he would stop and pretend to be doing something. This is when we started feeling a bit nervous. So we found a store that happened to be open on the holiday and ducked inside. He stopped and stood outside for a minute (trying not to look too obvious) then kept walking. We were relieved until we saw him turn around down the street. We were in this store for about 10 minutes, and we tried telling the storekeeper that we were being followed, but she thought we were telling her to get the mans attention, so we stopped. Finally, he walked back to the station, so we left through the side door and hurried down the street. Looking over our shoulders, we saw that he wasn't following us anymore. Thank goodness. We wasted the rest of our time walking by closed shops and restaurants, then headed back to the station to catch our train. And guess who was there waiting for the same train!! The man was back. Katie and I didn't want to get on, but the next train was another hour away, and Russ really wanted a knife. Our stop was about the 6th one down the line, and at every stop, this man was looking back at us (still smiling) seemingly to see if we were getting off. Katie and I busied ourselves looking up 'help' and 'police' in her Japanese dictionary. As our stop neared, we were getting more nervous- we didn't know what we would do if he got off after us. Katie was ready to yell at him, but we also didn't know what he had in that bag. When we finally got off the train, we started walking fast, and I was too nervous to look back, but Russ did, and the man didn't get off the train. Although we had theories about him just going to the next stop and finding us in the small city, or going back to the main station that we would have to return to to get home, we didn't see him again. We have no idea why he was following us or staring at us or smiling at us, but I hope to never see him again. This has probably been my scariest experience in Japan.