Japaniversary

everything all at once, but maybe not everywhere

September of 1988? My new coworkers took me to a historical theme park one Sunday. I am glad I let them dress me up and take this picture.

Although my flight out of LaGuardia left on July 31, 1988, I consider my Japan anniversary to be the date I first arrived: August 1.

I have been chronicling memories from those first few months on my social media accounts, and although someone asked if those posts were partial regurgitations of my memoir, they are generally not. I am letting my mind wander and scouring memories for little details that stuck out during my early days in a new country.

The exercise has been fruitful. Strange little things surface again. How the plane, for example, after touching down in Narita, could not approach any of the gates because they were all full. As a result, the plane needed to be unloaded on the tarmac. Buses ferried us from that parking spot to the terminal, and I remember how, when the plane door opened late in the afternoon, the air itself was different. Not just the smell, which, to my mind, had a stench at some midpoint between tropical and a humid pile of garbage. But the feel of the air was thicker, denser than what I had been used to.

New York and its suburbs are also humid. I was traveling from one gross summer to another, but the gross summer in Japan felt different. The air seemed anxious to connect with me. It rushed forward and embraced my skin. It interwove itself with my hair, so much so that I could still smell that stench several hours later when I arrived at the Tōkyō hotel that night.

Narita airport is gigantic. LaGuardia is, too, and although I hadn’t flown very often before traveling to Japan, LaGuardia made sense to me. I could understand the layout.

The issue with Narita wasn’t a language one. When I arrived in Japan, I could read enough Japanese to make sense of the signage. That wasn’t the problem. The layout of the terminal seemed to have Cretan inspiration—a maze, but without a Minotaur.

I barely remember how I got to, let alone passed through, Immigration, how I claimed my luggage, and how I reported to customs. I do, however, remember the arrival hall. From customs, you passed through an automatic doorway, and as a security device, there was another wall about one meter directly in front of you, and you had to slide around to the side to exit properly. Once I did so, the crowds were intense.

In 1988, there weren’t as many restrictions on terminal access in the United States. My parents waited with me at the gate, even though they had no ticket.

In Japan, however, there was no commingling for travelers and non-travelers. Everyone meeting an arriving passenger was consigned to wait in the long, narrow arrival hall. Once I entered that hall, I could see placards and posters welcoming me and other members of the JET Programme.

I then did something I shouldn’t have: I slept on the bus from the airport to downtown Tōkyō. I hadn’t been able to sleep on the fourteen-hour flight, and because the sun had gone down, all I could see from the bus were lights along a highway. After five minutes of that boring monotony, I zonked.

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I shared ten years of my life with Japan.

Thanksgiving in my Tōkyō apartment in 1994. Love and friendship in one room.

And Japan shared everything with me.

Thanks for sharing in my memories.