It's A Good Thing

I'm not a travel blogger

Aloha, mountain (photo by Weldon Berger)

There are no links. Listening to legendary Japanese rockers Yura Yura Teikoku at 39, 000 feet.

Out in the country where I stayed, probably at least half the automobiles were kei cars, little snub-nosed things, tiny on the outside but roomy on the inside. Lots of little kei trucks too, and vans. In Tokyo the proportion is much smaller.

A bit less than halfway twixt Tokyo and Honolulu, with Art Pepper and Chet Baker doing their best to drown out the roar of these giant-ass 787 engines.

As on the way over, no mask-hating crackers needed booting off the flight, although one guy had to be told to wear the mask over his nose, not just the mouth. American, naturally. Was coughing without a mask while we awaited the boarding call. Fuckhead.

One of my hosts is fluent in Japanese and the other gets by; I wanted for nothing in the way of communications. That changed as soon as I reached the airport to catch a connector flight to Tokyo, at which time I became dependent upon the gestural interpretive skills of flight attendants and shopkeepers.

I didn't have to take off my shoes or discard my coffee at the security checkpoints for the domestic flight, although they were inordinately interested in my laptop on the return lap.

One can't reasonably make sweeping observations about a country, and regions within it, when one doesn't have a clue about the language and hence the workaday culture but, still: Japan is a country where the frictionless getting done of things in ordinary situations where one isn't getting in anybody's way, is emphasized.

Which from my perspective is good. I felt much less like a large ungainly cretin-like creature than I could have been made to feel.

Customs in Tokyo on the way in were a bit snappish but that can be ascribed to the hordes of unlettered foreigners descending upon what looked like an understaffed contingent. I certainly didn't know what the fuck I was doing.

The tourism element of the trip was limited when one of my hosts fell ill, but I did get a bit of it in, as when the healthy host tried to kill me on a hike to the heights of a ruined castle. Mostly I just wanted to visit the people anyway.

You can expect little in the way of future trip-related stuff, but there will be pictures.

And that, comrades, is all I got.