On the long, unwinding railroad, on the sixth day — the day that, according to Christian texts, God created Man — a great dissatisfaction seeped into me as I continued to bask in the pride of seeing the majority of my fellow Americans transcend race in the selection of the next president of the United States.

Only six mornings after that historic day, the pettiness of racial disunity ripped me back to reality as I sat on a JR train a couple of stations from the line's terminus, Tokyo Station.

The seat beside me opened up, and the Japanese businessman standing in front of it took one look at me — a white, clean-shaven, short-haired American dressed in a dark tailored suit — and continued to stand. The doors closed and the relatively crowded train continued on its journey. Nearly a minute after the seat became available, I noticed a Japanese businessman from the other end of the car slowly skirting around one, two, three, four, five, six others toward the only open seat visible — the one next to me. Once the approaching businessman reached within arm's length, the standing businessman became aware of the impending intrusion upon his "territory," and laid claim by, well, slowly sitting in the seat. Can you hear my sigh?