Time Travel with Mister Donut

Have you ever travelled into the future and gotten a glimpse of the life you could be living decades from now?

I’m not one for queueing for food but when Mister Donut, a famous doughnut store in Japan, set up a pop-up store in my motherland for an exclusive period of a month, I was not adverse to jumping on the bandwagon. Mister Donut evokes warm, fuzzy feelings. I used to study Japanese at an outlet near my apartment when I was living in Japan. The wife is equally, if not more, enamoured of Mister Donut.

And so my wife, son and I made the trip. While waiting, the gentleman in front of us suddenly spoke to my son. He had heard my wife and me speaking Japanese and Chinese respectively to our boy. He then introduced his wife to us and explained that they were a Chinese man-Japanese lady couple too.

We smiled and nodded our heads and exchanged pleasantries. But nothing else came out of this encounter. We bought our highly coveted doughnuts and left the site.

Famished, we stood outside Idaten, dismayed at the prospect of having to wait to sit down. The Chinese gentleman whom we had met earlier outside Mister Donut then called out to us and motioned us to sit down beside him and his wife. Well, I wasn’t going to say nope. That’s how we settled down beside them at Idaten.

The pleasantries evolved into a chat. They have been married for 33 years; she has been living in Singapore for 3 decades. They met each other when he was pursuing his studies in Kobe. They have 3 kids, all of whom are trilingual. Their eldest boy is working in Tokyo now - he loves Japan to bits, it seems.

So what I witnessed before me was a senpai couple who took a stab at an international marriage - when interracial couples were not as common as today. It might have been an excruciating decision for the lady to move over to Singapore. After all, not many Japanese stores were available in Singapore back then.

I also actually felt a little sense of melancholy. Their eldest boy is not living in the same country with them right now. Of course, I would love it if my boy decides to pursue his fortune elsewhere in the world when he grows up (best if he leaves a room for us to come and crash). But your child’s life is only intertwined with yours for a particular season in his life. As Elizabeth Gilbert wrote, “The days are long, but the years are short.” Best to endure those toddler tantrums as best as I can because they will come to pass.

Who would have thought that a shopping trip at Mister Donut would have yielded a renewed appreciation of life? But I guess that’s not the thing you most want to know.

So how long did we wait? About two hours. If my experience is anything to go by, the crowd seems to have subsided around 12.30pm. Maybe it’s a good time for you to start queueing for your doughnuts.