It’s 7:20PM local time. We are settling into our room at the Asakusa View hotel in Tokyo. We were escorted to our room by an unusually talkative bellhop who went on engagingly about the new Sky Tree tower which is half-built and visible from our room (pictures forthcoming; it’s dark now). He asked where we were from, and then asked whether Colorado was near Ohio, and hence whether we had many taifun. After a brief rest to recover some semblance of our senses after the journey, which takes around 24 hours, we went to Life, a grocery store next to the hotel and brought back dinner in the form of various kinds of take-out food.
We are so glad to be here again. I can’t explain why but I love this country, and maybe I’d forgotten that a little. Partway through the Seattle-Tokyo flight I had a serious moment of doubt and pain, wondering whether it was worth the hassle and the expense and the gruelling 10 hours of being trapped in a not entirely comfortable seat in a noisy tube full of other people. Then, finally, the flight was almost over and we descended through the clouds and I saw the first sakura tree and then the neatly groomed hedges and the compact cars, and the fatigue of travel fell away in an instant.
We were whisked through the airport by a middle-aged woman who laughingly bemoaned the fact that the sakura were not yet blooming when she went out to see them on her day off but were now in full bloom and she has to work. As usual I nodded off now and then in the hour-long car trip to the hotel from the airport, but I did manage to wake up in time to see a few bits of Tokyo I had always slept through previously. Tracie later said that she realized that she kept smiling for the duration of the drive.
I can’t speak more than half a dozen words of the language, I can’t read anything other than the occasional bits of oddly chosen English (“Hotel First Wood” is a favorite landmark not far from the airport), I don’t pretend to have anything but the most superficial understanding of a fraction of the customs, and yet I love being here.
Now I must eat, starting with one of the ubiquitous little triangular packages of seaweed-wrapped rice, whose name I once knew, briefly.
