SENDAI—A Nepalese student felt something was wrong when he boarded a rather decrepit-looking bus. Sure enough, the vehicle later broke down, but he felt his trusty friend would soon help to fix the problem.

Then came an awful sound like an explosion. Glass fragments fell from the sky, and people were crying and screaming in horror.

Yubraj Thapa, 27, and Nawaraj Tamang, 21, two close compatriots whom the student considered his “brothers,” were killed on May 16 when a large truck rear-ended the bus on the Tohoku Expressway in Kurihara, Miyagi Prefecture.

“I keep seeing the scene over and over again,” the Japanese language school student, who is in his 20s, said on May 18. “It’s eating into my brain.”

The bus was carrying 40 students from Nepal and Bangladesh from Sendai to Ichinoseki, Iwate Prefecture, where they worked overnight shifts at a factory.

The bus had stopped close to the shoulder after experiencing engine problems, and the students had all gotten off the bus.

Police believe Yubraj, who was studying at a vocational school for automobile mechanics, and Nawaraj, a Japanese language school student, were checking the engine at the rear of the bus with the driver when the truck slammed into them.

The bus driver, 56, was also killed in the accident, while the trucker, 30, was seriously injured.

The student said Yubraj and Nawaraj were the only people he could rely on in Japan. Like himself, both came to Japan by borrowing money and dreamed of running their own businesses.

‘DO YOU SMELL SOMETHING BURNING?’

The student said he and the others usually take a bus that leaves Sendai around 7 p.m. and arrives in Ichinoseki around 8 p.m. The shift starts at 9 p.m. and ends at 6:30 a.m. the following morning.

When he returns to Sendai on a bus, he heads straight to his Japanese language school, where he attends classes from 8:30 a.m. until noon.

On May 16, “I felt something was amiss right from the moment I got on the bus,” the student said in an interview with The Asahi Shimbun.

He noticed that the vehicle that arrived at the pick-up point in Sendai was not the usually large bus he takes to the factory.

The bus that day also looked old and slightly ramshackle, and the paint appeared faded, he said.

When he sat down in the last row of seats, the interior was so hot that he had to take off his jacket.

He also asked those around him, “Do you smell something burning?” His fellow passengers agreed.

He thought he might have been overly concerned with the smell and decided to get some sleep.

A little past 8 p.m., a jolt and a “clunking” sound roused him from his slumber, and the bus slowly came to a stop.

The burning smell was stronger, and he saw white smoke outside the rear window.

“Get off, everyone! It might blow up!” he shouted at the other students who all rushed outside.

The female driver tried to open the rear hatch of the bus to check the engine, but to no avail. Yubraj stepped up to offer his help.

The student jokingly asked Yubraj, “You are going to the mechanics school, so you can fix it, right?”

His friend seemed too focused on the work at hand to answer.

Looking back, the student regrets saying those words to Yubraj.

To cool down the engine, the driver and Yubraj splashed water on it using 500ml bottles the students had brought with them on the bus.

For a few minutes, the student and other passengers helped in the repair effort by using their smartphones to shine light on the engine.

Around five to 10 minutes after the bus stopped, the situation with the engine had not improved.

When the student sat down on the shoulder of the road near the rear end of the bus, the driver and Yubraj were still splashing water on the engine.

“I will take a video of this and send it to my friends,” he thought.

At that very moment, he heard a blast, and shattered glass pieces fell onto his cap.

“The engine must have exploded!”

He then saw the bodies of his friend and the driver being thrown into the passing lane of the expressway.

The bus that had been right in front of him was pushed tens of meters ahead.

Behind the bus, he could see the truck that had crashed into it.

Some students waiting on the shoulder of the road started shouting and bawling. The student told them to climb up a small hill that was ahead.

Five minutes later, he realized that Nawaraj, who had been next to him, was missing.

“Yubraj and Nawaraj died,” he thought to himself.

He blanked out, and his body could not stop shaking.

TRUSTED FRIENDS

At the factory in Ichinoseki, the students worked in teams of two to three to place glass panels, each weighing from 1 kilogram to up to 25 kg, into window frames and pack them in cardboard boxes.

The student works three days a week. The hourly wage is just shy of 1,400 yen ($10), which provides him around 150,000 yen a month.

It is considered a good-paying job for a foreign student.

The student said it was a given that he would have to make money in Japan.

His family had paid about 2 million yen to an agency in Nepal to arrange a visa and other documents necessary for him to stay in Japan.

His family had borrowed the money from a bank by putting up their land as collateral.

“I think the 39 other students on the bus are more or less in the same situation (as I am),” he said.

The student came to know Yubraj and Nawaraj during breaks at the factory.

The three were in the same working group of eight to nine people, and they soon started to open themselves up to one another.

Yubraj, who came to Japan more than a year ago, was like an older brother to the student.

“When I graduate (from the mechanics school), I will find a wife in Nepal and come back to Japan for work,” Yubraj told the student.

The two were constantly together and traveled to many tourist sites.

Nawaraj was like a younger brother.

Although having been in Japan for only six months, he was fluent in Japanese.

Whenever the two were on the same shift, Nawaraj taught Japanese to the student one word at a time, including “definitely” and “important.”

Yubraj and Nawaraj had both told him that they borrowed money to come to Japan.

The three shared food and drinks whenever one of them was short of money.

The student said they also shared the same dream: starting their own businesses after learning in Japan, a developed country.

HAD TO TELL ABOUT HIS FRIENDS

After the accident, the student was questioned for three to four hours at a police station.

It was 6 a.m. on May 17 when he returned to Sendai. He went straight to his Japanese language school, but his mind was blank throughout the classes.

He said he had not slept at all before he sat down for the interview with Asahi.

When asked why he agreed to be interviewed, he said of his friends, “There is no one as kind as they were, and I wanted to tell everyone that those precious lives have been lost, forever.”

He added, “If we had not gotten off the bus, everyone could have died.”

He also expressed anger toward the bus company.

“If they had checked the bus properly before departure, this might not have happened,” he said. “I think the bus company is responsible for sending the bodies to their families in our home country. Such an accident should not happen again.”

He now feels he does not have anyone he can fully rely on in Japan. But life must go on.

“I have to pay my rent. I have loans, too. If I stop working and stop studying Japanese, I cannot survive.”

After the interview, the student left to take a bus for his night shift at the factory in Ichinoseki.

(This article was written by Jin Hirakawa and Ayumu Oyama.)