Due to temporary staffing circumstances that are neither interesting enough nor appropriate for discussion here, Kristen has semi-volunteered/been assigned to work for four weeks in the pediatric clinic at Misawa Air Base, a joint U.S./Japan military installation in northern Japan. The current dynamic of our Mother/Nursing Baby/Stay-at-Home Dad routine sort of makes this clan a package-deal at the moment, and Megan and I are quite portable, considering that all of my other notable responsibilities can be accommodated with a decent internet connection and she is a baby. So we are in Japan - a month in Misawa, followed by a week of vacation, traveling the parts of the country that the Lonely Planet guide book has convinced us to be the most interesting.
Friday, 14 June 2013
We depart Alaska at 11:05 AM, on a version of the now-standard Alaska Airlines flight to Seattle that kicks-off nearly all of our travel. ANC is a respectable commercial outfit with 25+ gates in two terminals, but as a measure of our current remoteness from places we tend to visit, I now view this leg as little more than the shuttle that gets us to The Real Airport, this despite a 3.5-hour flight time that would rank it among the longer flights of my life on such a list if compiled two years ago.
At time of take-off, the only items so far identified to be forgotten at home are the International Driving Permits, a document that the U.S. Embassy's official website recommends that one acquire from one's local AAA office if one wishes to drive a car while abroad. AAA's involvement in this struck me as odd and a little grift-y, in that I know the American Automobile Association not as an official document-issuing government agency but as more of just a club that offers hotel discounts and will fetch you a tow truck. The actual experience of acquiring the things did little to make me feel any better about it - I paid a lady $30 so that I could sit at her desk for half an hour while she told me about her second home in eastern Tennessee and made slightly racist baby-talk with Megan ("You're going to learn that squinty-eye language while you are over there, yes you are!"), all while inking a few dozen "AAA" stamps onto the pages of a barely official-looking paper booklet which, after all of this stamping and tactless chatter, looked to be little more than a receipt documenting that I gave $30 to AAA. More recently, I have learned that the IDPs should not be required for us (nor sufficient - I am told we must instead use a military-issued permit while driving on and around the base), and we are not even sure that we intend to drive there anyway, so the fact that they are sitting in a file cabinet in Anchorage is not catastrophic, but it does retroactively shift all hours spent acquiring them from "Possibly Unnecessary but Well-Intentioned" to "Stupid Waste of Time and Money."
We arrive at Sea-Tac, where we will spend 5 hours awaiting our flight to Tokyo. I enjoy this airport. While acknowledging the obvious element of Stockholm Syndrome in saying this about a public transit terminal in which we have had little choice but to spend 20+ cumulative hours over the past two years but in which I would never voluntarily hang out, the experience is always as pleasant as can be hoped: good local food (largely the sort that is not gastrointestinally regrettable 30,000 feet later), a few quirky shops capable of keeping one occupied for the better part of an hour, lots of natural light, comfortable-enough lounge seats with ample power outlets, dedicated water bottle filling stations, and Caffè Vita, a local roaster whose Concourse C outpost delivers my current favorite coffee/pastry combo experience, competition not limited to those that take place inside of an airport. (On at least one occasion, we have arranged travel plans with a slightly-longer-than-necessary Seattle layover to ensure time for a latte and flaky apple croissant thing.)
DL 581 departs at 8:10 PM with a 10.5-hour scheduled flight time. This is my first legitimate international flight, I am told. We went to Nassau for our honeymoon, but many, many people have smugly assured me that this does not count. This is confusing because the Bahamas is indeed a country separate from the one where I keep all of my stuff, and I definitely had to get a passport and declare a banana (which was confiscated). It is not clear what unspoken criterion this trip did not meet; perhaps the destination was not foreign enough, or far enough away, or perhaps the trip is disqualified because it did not involve a connection in JFK or Heathrow or de Gaulle or some other sufficiently huge airport with a name that is something other than just the city where it is. To clarify: I make no attempt to equate your five-week summer-after-sophomore-year Hostels 'n' Cafés tour of Western Europe with my 70-minute flight to a tropical island for six days in a pool ordering all-included Mai Tais from English-speaking bartenders, but let's please all agree that I have a stamp on my passport.
The flight over the Pacific is long but uneventful. Megan has a few antsy stretches, and she does not sleep on our laps as well as she did when we last flew several months ago, but complaining about a few fussy moments during 18+ hours of travel would unfairly suggest that she is not embarrassingly easy to travel with (she is). I use the tiny personal entertainment unit to watch Side Effects, multiple reviews of which describe it as a "pharmaceutical thriller," as if this is an acknowledged genre. This is 40 is also available, which I feel no urgency to watch because I have also paid for and downloaded the same film to my laptop as a 48-hour rental, which I now feel no urgency to watch because it is also available right here on the airplane entertainment unit. The result of this logical short-circuit is me spending a full 10 hours not watching it anywhere, qualifying the now-expired rental download as Stupid Waste of Time and Money #2, a designation that I shall henceforth abbreviate in this correspondence with a more convenient acronym (SWT&M), for which I desperately hope to encounter no further use.
An overwhelming majority of passengers on the flight are Japanese, which probably makes more sense than the plane full of American tourists I had somehow envisioned. In an early firsthand comparison between our cultures, I observe that most of the Japanese seem to find the bagel breakfast sandwich served 90 minutes before landing to be just as horrifying as I do. We are not so different!
Saturday, 15 June 2013
Saturday largely does not exist, a casualty of a 17-hour time difference between Alaska and Japan (we arrive in Tokyo at ~10:30 PM Saturday, some 26+ clock-hours after we left Seattle). I am welcomed by a very sophisticated and confusing toilet.
Flights to Misawa are not offered at this late hour, so we have arranged to stay one night at "Hotel JAL City Haneda Tokyo", as approximately translated. We navigate customs and manage to find the complimentary shuttle bus, which takes us on an eight-minute ride to what appears to be 1995, if assessing by the multiple Zima advertisements posted at the entrance to our hotel's restaurant. We haul five weeks' worth of luggage into a hotel room that has been precisely sized to fit one bed, five weeks' worth of luggage, and zero people. It is 11:45 PM, or perhaps 6:45 AM, or whatever.
Sunday, 16 June 2013
We have scheduled the Misawa flight for 1:15 PM in hopes of sleeping through the night and into mid-morning, perhaps making a dent in the jet lag. Megan has declared that she does not care for this plan, staying awake for large swaths of the next five hours and aggressively requesting company. Kristen and I groggily coordinate a plan to alternate shifts, one of us staying up with her while the other sleeps, but this does little beyond clarify which one of us should feel bad for having fallen asleep whenever we are both simultaneously awoken by Megan's impressive twisting double rib-kicks w/ occasional accompanying face-rake. (We made no front-desk inquiries about the availability of whatever extremely tiny crib might fit in the 11" of available space between the desk and the bed, so she joins us on the queen-size.) This fiasco abruptly ends at approximately 5:15 AM when we fear that we have somehow run out of diapers; we do ultimately find a few more, but not before we are awake and I am locating my shoes to make a run to the 24-hour mart across the street, during which there is an incident involving the bed and one temporarily-diaperless individual. So we are up.
It might be Father's Day, depending on one's interpretation of time zones and international recognition of such things. In celebration, we make our way downstairs to Brasserie Zima (name not confirmed) for the breakfast buffet, which appears to be a standard daily offering that is in no way associated with any American celebrations of parenthood (obviously). Browsing the selections, it is clear that my attempts to brace myself for the strangeness of the food in this country will turn out to be both mostly accurate and still wildly insufficient. Beyond the "Western" section - a table of sweet pastries, plus a series of bowls, labeled as "SCRAMBLED EGG" and "CRISPY POTATOES", which are filled with something that you might in fact guess to be those things if given at least three tries - lies a spread that is jarring to encounter at 7:30 AM: A salad bar with unidentifiable raw vegetables that may or may not exist in my home hemisphere, way too much fish, various curries and soups, a giant bowl of extremely tiny shrimp, and "TODAY'S SELECTION OF PICKLES". All of this, of course, seems strange only because of my own narrow perspective - free of bias, no logic dictates the correctness of eggs in the morning and seafood later. But I am biased, and I only got like 3 nonconsecutive hours of sleep, and this is a brunch-y kind of holiday in my home country, all of which leaves me grumpily craving an omelet with cured chunks of land mammal instead of this rice with viscous pale goo and okra-like mystery nuggets that I am made to eat with wooden sticks. (I take it back, bagel-despising airplane contingent: We are quite different.) I make the best of it with six mini Danishes and a mental pledge to be more open-minded (later), and after a brief walk through the surrounding neighborhood on an unsuccessful hunt for diapers, we check out of the hotel and catch the 10:00 AM shuttle back to Haneda Airport.
We are ticketed for Japan Airlines flight 1241 to Misawa. We check-in and drop off our luggage in a routine that is mostly familiar, notable only for the zero additional dollars required to check three suitcases, a car seat, and, at the representative's polite but stern insistence, our stroller, which we had intended to gate check until we noticed the neat stroller/cart combos that everyone was pushing around, provided for free by the airport and generally a much nicer ride than the cheap umbrella-style number with which we are traveling.
Although we flew into this airport last night, my understanding is that Haneda now serves as the "local" Tokyo airport, primarily handling the city's domestic flights, while the newer Narita sees most of the international traffic. (To ensure confusion, Haneda's official name is "Tokyo International Airport".) But "local" does not mean "small" - it is the 4th busiest airport in the world, with three large terminals and an extensive built-in shopping mall, the bottom two levels of which we browse before departure. Selections are overwhelmingly edible, primarily the sort of excessively-packaged treats meant for sharing with the office - cookies, chocolates, fruit, doughnuts decorated to look like animals, cheesecakes, and, of course, packages of tiny fish - most individually-wrapped and offered in boxes of 6+ pieces per.
We have successfully located an ATM capable of processing our U.S. debit cards, so I am now in possession of some real-life Yen and attempting to develop an on-the-fly competence for slickly using it in cash transactions. This turns out to be generally straightforward. ¥100 is currently ~$1 USD, making all conversions a convenient zero-dropping sort, and any taxes appear to be included in the labeled prices. The smallest Japanese bill is ¥1000 (roughly $10), with coins up to
¥500, which is fine except for my tendency to forget that some of the coins are worth $5 and I end up accidentally accumulating $15-$20
in change. When paying for things, the amount owed is always presented visually, via either LCD monitor or cash register display or even handheld solar calculator; this is done with such consistency and diligence as to suggest that doing so may be a legal obligation. All bills and most coins are labeled with standard Arabic numerals (note that this is not true for American coins, which forgo "5"/"10"/"25" in lieu of inconsistently-phrased identifiers like "FIVE CENTS," "ONE DIME," and "QUARTER DOLLAR" that seem to go out of their way to insist that one be capable of intricately parsing the written English language just to understand the denominations), although there is one coin bearing only Japanese writing, which, despite my growing collection of them received as change, I avoid using until I am certain what it is. (It's ¥5.)
There is a sort of ceremony to the cash exchange, it seems, in which I am likely not participating appropriately. After gesturing to the display with an open-palm The Price is Right-style "Here is what you owe" sort of move, the cashier usually brings her hands together and down, awaiting my move, which is to put the coins and bills into the ~4"x6" plastic tray on the counter between us (there is always a plastic tray). The cashier responds to this with a brief pause, accompanied by a sort of anticipatory head motion that eventually morphs into a slight nod but never without me feeling like I was supposed to do something else, some motion to indicate: "There is the money." All I can ever think to do is the same open-palm presentation thing, which might just look like I am mocking her, or maybe a double thumbs-up, which can't possibly be right. The cashier makes change (usually rounded down to the fives, interestingly - there is a ¥1 coin, but it seems that they are rarely given out) and places it directly into your hand (instead of into the tray) before smiling broadly and speaking an extensive series of words that might just add up to "Thank you, have a nice day" but seems much longer than that. I awkwardly nod and back away, which is probably what she expects of me at this point.
We take our snacks to the gate for boarding, a process conducted entirely in Japanese but with a familiar format and featuring enough context clues for us to get the idea. ([ANNOUNCEMENT], two families with multiple small children board, [ANNOUNCEMENT], men in business suits board, [ANNOUNCEMENT], most of the people who can understand the announcements board, [FINAL ANNOUNCEMENT], the last few Japanese plus us and all of the other confused Americans board.) The flight lasts less than an hour, winding down with an approach over a very green and very rural landscape of paddy fields before landing at a facility bearing all of the unmistakeable beige monotony of a U.S. military base, an odd turn of events considering that this is a commercial flight. We taxi to the gate (which turns out to be The Gate - there is one) and deplane to meet an unexpected welcoming committee, an extremely nice group of people with whom Kristen will be working for the next month. They help us with our luggage while explaining that we did in fact land on the base before taxiing off of it - for lack of an alternative, the six commercial flights that land here every day do so via a special arrangement allowing use of one of the military's runways.
The next few hours are pre-sleep blur - checking into the hotel, setting up the Pack 'n Play, grocery shopping, and an extremely generous sanity-saving trip to the home of the nurse that Kristen will be working with, who has three young children and a house full of the sort of too-big-for-a-suitcase toys that look capable of keeping an 11-month-old occupied, some of which she is willing to lend. We make over-easy eggs with toast for dinner, for reasons best described as a combination of laziness and some vague patriotic defiance of whatever that was we had for breakfast. It is 7:20 PM, and we are going to bed.
