As I am so fond of reminding my mother, the entire sequence of events that led to me living in Japan for 2 years while studying for a masters degree can be traced back to one fateful “conversation” around the dinner table before I began my freshman year of college at Washington & Lee University. We’ve got more important (and interesting) things to talk about so I’ll keep it short, but here’s a summary of that conversation:

Me: I think I would like to study Japanese at school…
Mom: I think that’s a terrible idea…
Me: Well I’m going to do it anyway!
Mom: Well then you can pay for your own tuition!

Now there was certainly more dialogue, and Dad chimed in with some bits of wisdom regarding his studying Russian at Amherst, and there may even have been some profanity, but that about covers the gist of that humid summer’s evening back in early August of 2001…

Fast forward almost exactly 5 years and I’m standing with my girlfriend in the seafood section of the basement grocery of the largest department store in town trying to decide which platter of sushi to buy and bring with us to the airport to meet my parents. Selection made, girlfriend proceeds towards the registers – awesome array of sumptuous and succulent sushi in hand (that’s called alliteration boys & girls!) – while I head for the drink section when my phone vibrates…

“It’s mom, we missed our flight from Tokyo to Oita, we’re going to get a hotel and take the first one out in the morning…” Hold the sushi, this party is over.

If you have somehow missed it while reading this site, I live in the boonies of Japan. In order to get here you have to first fly into one of the major international airports (Tokyo, Nagoya, or Osaka depending on your carrier) and then transfer to JAL, the domestic carrier, for the final leg to the famed Oita Airport with all of its TWO arrival gates. My parents’ flight from the U.S. arrived reasonably on schedule, and they had about a four hour window to make it to the other flight, but several things conspired to sabotage their itinerary:

For starters, Tokyo has two airports, one – Narita – handles all international flights and the other – Haneda – well, you can figure it out. Transferring from one to the other is accomplished via a variety of means, but my parents had to do it during rush hour and that was not particularly speedy. Furthermore, before even reaching that hurdle they lost a lot of time passing through Customs. So the plane was missed and my poor parents spent their first night in Japan at an airport hotel in Tokyo, by themselves.

Their misfortune is your gain however, because we can put our anthropologist hats on and observe what happens when you place two Americans who don’t speak Japanese in a hotel in the largest city on earth and give them 12 hours or so to kill. Their minds unsullied by my “local-boy” influence, they were free to experience the wonders and majesty of modern Japan, to go wherever the wind took them, and to explore – perhaps for the first time – a country and a culture where literally *everything* was new to them…

So what did they do? Well, my mom immediately went to sleep and dad stood in the hotel lobby and marveled at the vending machines.

Lest you forget, Japan has the greatest vending machines in the world, and to a first time visitor these goddamn things can be fascinating.

We mustn’t be mean though, dad did have enough wits about him to stop and take in the excellent architectural features of the hotel they were staying in.

He then stumbled upon what might perhaps be one of the greatest secrets of Japan – the plastic food. Nearly all restaurants, no matter how classy, have window fronts with plastic food displaying their menu offerings for all to see. Don’t laugh, this stuff is a fucking art form in this country.

No matter what type of food they’re replicating, they make it look dead real. The only real giveaway in that particular piece is the miso soup on the right – it’s not quite shiny enough for a liquid – otherwise, it’s brilliant.

The last picture taken by my parents during that first day was this one, and it contains a few interesting mentions that one wouldn’t necessarily notice on first glance.

First off, note the plasma TV and bonsai plant to the right of my father – welcome to Tokyo, Japan, we don’t dick around with cathode-ray-tube TVs here, no sir. Secondly, if you look out the window you can see it’s raining. Unfortunately, this would be a continuing trend for the first 9 or 10 days of the trip. Lastly, dad is inexplicably wearing his hotel-provided bathrobe over both his jeans and his button down shirt..? This silliness must sadly be chalked up to them being alone without my constant care and supervision during those first 24hrs. I assure you such behaviors were corrected quickly and firmly from Day 2 onwards…

All in all though, I think my parents did damn well. I felt pretty guilty when mom told me they had missed their connection – their travel agent had recommended flying into Nagoya where they wouldn’t have had to change airports but I argued against it since it was slightly more expensive and look what happened… But they had a bit of fun on their own, mom in bed jet-lagged out of her mind and dad wandering the hotel corridors with his new Nikon camera, and it set the stage for an even grander arrival the following morning in Oita…