On Being Almost Right

Yesterday was the second day after a long New Year holiday. When I entered the building where my office is located, I ran into an administrative staff member in front of the elevator. She looked unusually eager to talk to me, almost relieved by the timing. She told me she had just seen a strange paper left in the copy room on the seventh floor—it had my name on it, along with words that looked like a contract. She was certain it hadn’t been there before the year-end holidays, which made her wonder whether something had happened during the break. She insisted that I should come and check it with her.

I was genuinely puzzled. I have never been to the seventh floor of that building, and I couldn’t imagine having signed a contract in physical form. For a moment, we half-jokingly imagined worst-case scenarios—misplaced personal information, or something more serious. Perhaps influenced by the mystery novels I had been reading during the holidays, I found myself oddly curious rather than frightened, slightly thrilled to see what it would turn out to be.

When we arrived on the seventh floor and walked along the corridor, she suddenly corrected herself. It wasn’t the seventh floor, she said—it was the eighth. That already made more sense, as the eighth floor is where my office actually is. When we reached the copy room, we found the paper she meant, placed neatly on a shelf beside a large copy machine. As I adjusted my eyes to read it, I recognized it even before understanding the content—by my own handwriting, by my name.

The paper wasn’t a contract at all, but a pledge form I had signed months ago when submitting an article to a departmental journal in Japanese. The editor had required a standard statement for routine procedural formalities. The reason it appeared only after the holidays was simple: no one had used the copy machine long enough to reopen the scanner lid, notice the forgotten paper, and move it aside. When I told her it was fine and not a problem at all, she looked visibly relieved. I thanked her sincerely for paying attention to something like this and for letting me know right away.

I found the episode quietly amusing. A one-floor discrepancy, a single-character difference (誓約書 for “pledge” and 契約書 for “contract”） in reading, were enough to make the situation feel mysterious. For a moment, we had imagined multiple scenarios based on those perceived facts—even the possibility of having to report something somewhere—only to discover it was just a sheet of paper I had forgotten. Like fearing a monster’s shadow on the curtain, and then finding a small frog when the window is finally opened.

The episode also reminded me of a thought I often have when watching crime documentaries: how witnesses speak with such precision about what they saw. Some can even help draw a composite sketch, recalling the face of a criminal in remarkable detail. Those contributions are undoubtedly important and valuable. I know, however, that I would not be a reliable witness myself—my eyesight is poor, and I am not particularly attentive to my surroundings.

And yet, even careful attention does not guarantee accuracy. As in yesterday’s case, small misperceptions—a floor number and a single character in a word—combined with a particular focus on the idea that the paper had not been there before the holidays can quickly form a coherent frame, even when the observation itself is recent. Once that frame is in place, the perceived facts may point us in a direction very far from what actually happened.