Dave and Josh Vs. Japan

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