Installed in Sapporo

Well, we made it!  Installed in Sapporo, more to come once jetlag recedes just a tad.

     

View out our 10th flr hotel window:

Ground level, 6 AM:

Can you not want Bump of Chicken?  Can you do no less?

- D

- D

Skimashita! (sorta)

Well, we have touched down in Tokyo Narita and are awaiting our connection to Sapporo.  Our journey seemed off to an auspicious beginning, as the desk clerk at reservations not only put us in a bulkhead exit row, but also very kindly decided to "ignore" the fact that my suitcase was no less than TEN POUNDS over the limit and not charge me.  We really hope we have not used up our entire store of good luck points for this voyage already.

Our flight on the (in)famous Dreamliner began with pilot apologizing for the Dreamliner's somewhat tarnished reputation, and assuring us that this plane is every bit airworthy and reliable.  I feel safe in wagering that this is only something one would hear on Japanese-owned 787s....

I have to say, for a flying glitch factory, it's at least an aesthetically pleasing one. Feels like being aboard the the Enterprise-D - all smooth curves, rounded gunmetal gray corridors - infrared lighting in the bathrooms (sensor on-off for toilet and sink), polarized window. 

How else do you know you're on a Japanese plane?  Every few hours the lights would come on anda a stone-faced woman on a videoscreen would instruct you to engage in calisthenics, all while cautioning you not to disturb those near you,

My favorite, though, had to be the animated safety video, which showed a plane making an emergency landing and all the passengers running from it en masse, practically screaming "gozilla! godzilla!"

Here we are enjoying steaming, spicy bowls of hot ramen noodles.  Having flown about 13 hours here, we now have decided our trip is complete, and will return home promptly.

(heh)

Behold - the mighty soy-sauce Dalek!  Fear its wrath!  "Saturate!  Sat-u-rate!"

We toyed extremely briefly with the idea of Dalek-napping him and taking pictures all over Japan (soysauce Dalek in front of Buddha statues, soysauce Dalek winning a Sumo match, soysauce Dalek having lunch with the Prime Minister), and were this any other country than Japan, we just might have...but you just can't do dick moves like that in Japan.  It would just be wrong.  So we'll have to photoshop him into various scenes.  

Which we won't have the energy to do.

We used it all up getting sent from floor to floor trying to find the domestic departures area, which four different people told us four different locations for, but we're here now.

So here we are, enjoying our comfortable wireless access....in a strange post-apocalyptic Narita seems practically deserted....now they're calling us to board, so hopefully the next transmission you receive will be from our hotel, and not from some gulag somewhere (come on, even gulags these days have free wireless, right?  Right?)

- D

Leaving on a Jet Plane

...all packed (thanks to our long-suffering wives) and ready to go...heading out!

- D

Hello? Hello? Is this thing on? Who are you kids, and why are you on my lawn?

A blog? Here? In future year 2013? Ahhh! How quaint! For a moment I thought it was 2006,

Alright then,

So it begins,

Well...I suppose it hasn't BEGUN yet. It's the beginning of the beginning though.

And we're going on one of those flying deathtraps too! I mean, more than usual! Ha ha!

Ah well..if we surprise, it will be so worth it. Japan will not be able to handle our combined might!

(BTW Dave, which of the two guys on the banner do I get to be? The guy with the scythe? It's the guy with the scythe right? Oh, who am I kidding, it's the creepy guy to the right. Well..I'm going to own my creepytude!)

-Josh

We are at T-minus 5 days now, and after kidney stone scares kept us on a daily cliffhanger, I think we're finally confident enough to begin pre-flight checks.  Of course, it doesn't matter for shit what our pre-flight checks are: someone tell Boeing to get their act together already on that lovely Dreamliner that we're ticketed for.  You know, the one with all the electrical woes.  The one that just last week launched from Boston (our port of departure) for Narita (our port of disembarkation) and had to turn around 5 hours in due to some sort of fuel pump thingie.  Lord - ten hours in the air, to end up where you started. At least JAL's onboard meals are excellent, and their movie offerings boast, among other titles, a Japanese police action drama where all of the cops are inexplicably fourth graders.

Anyway, who are we and why are we risking life and limb to travel to the Land of the Rising Sun when we could just get pirate Sushi-Tv at home and watch adorable tykes use automatic shotguns to chew through Yakuza thugs from the comfort of our own home?  And why are we blogging about it, anyway?

Well, this was us...in 1994...when we'd already been friends for six years....

 ....so do the math (please, because I suck at it myself) and now we've been pals for 25 years, not to mention both over the 35 hump that makes 40 loom dangerously, "that's no moon" kind of close.

Why Japan?

Well, Japan is awesome in far too many ways to list, but I will say that Japan to me was little more than the vaguely formed notion of small cars, Ninjas, Voltron, the place where my Atari games somehow came from (this was the 80s), and the people who would one day soon own America (this was the 80s).  Josh was the first person I ever knew who had been there and back, to tell tales of man-eating deer and Hello-Kitty flavored underwear dispensed in vending machines by robot godzilla butlers.  Very, very polite robot godzilla butlers.

Flash-forward a quarter of a century, and through several very bizarre twists of fortune, I'm the director of a small-scale Japanese-American relations program, have visited Japan over 10 times and hosted Japanese visitors twice as often...by this point, I am on a first-name basis with the robot Godzilla butlers. I speak good enough nihongo to graduate from "oh, that's cute, he speaks some Japanese" to "wow, this Western Devil is bona fidely stupid."

I've made good friends over there, yet my friends here have never met them, and vice versa.

The thing is, Josh kind of got me turned on to this whole Japan thing ages ago, and now, decades later, I want to return the favor.  I'm taking Josh along to see MY Japan.

Our plans are ambitious and extensive - visiting dignitaries, riding the Shinkansen up and down the country, visiting a live volcano in the heart of Shinto Hell, paying our respects on the anniversary of the dropping of the A-bomb in Hiroshima, capsule hotels...

The kami may well be laughing at our plans even as we speak, the shinobi sharpening their swords to slit our throats in the night, and JAL eagerly awaiting our baggage fees.  But we shall face the danger head-on, as Samurai of the first order.

In the poorly paraphrased words of the real Joker (not Heath-Overdose...although, to be fair, not Caesar Romero, either):  "Japan thinks it's weird and scary?  Wait 'till it gets a load of us"

Oh, why the blog?  That's just in case we don't come back alive. 

Or, at the very least, it's something for our respective spouses and children to look at, sigh, and contemplate their vengeance upon us.  I'm hoping my daughter can be placated with plush pokemon.

Heywa.

- D