Winged Brothers

Whose wing am I soaring on?

Mine, I told myself.

We were gliding over the Pacific, the world’s widest ocean, thought for a long time to be the final frontier of man, by someone, surely, and I was seated right by the wing, thoughts lost in the depth of the water and how final and peaceful and solemn death was in the Pacific. To tell you the truth, I half expected to die on the flight, my mind drunk on the disbelief of my journey to the land I’d read about in James Clavell’s Shogun, glimpsed in countless Studio Ghibli films, and escaped to in various Square Enix video games. Eight-year old me was staring at a brilliantly lit screen in a small Spanish-style hued home underneath tawny Cowles Mountain in San Diego and wondering whether years from then, I would, as an adult, find a way to the world only my childhood unconscious had visited.

Looking around the plane, though, I didn’t think about any of the stories which wove the Japan in my head, (and whose virility I had no clue whether I could trust) and did something else: I watched. My eyes soaked in the details of what the other passengers, primarily Japanese, from what I could gather, were doing. Warm wet towelettes arrived. I unfolded mine, and cocked my head. Were they for your neck, a complimentary relaxation towel? I watched the man next to me, who was rubbing his face with his towel. These are face towels, I declared to myself, and promptly toweled my face. No one cared. I relaxed. Later I would learn that these were towelettes for washing your hands, through careful study of the rest of the plane, and that my face-toweling friend, was simply a guy who felt like his face needed some toweling. Don’t we all, sometimes?

Turning to my fellow wing-side passenger, the two of us isolated by the aisle, I then decided to invoke my rudimentary Japanese. Hailing from a high school Japanese class in which students play-fought with rulers, guerilla-crawled out of the classroom and received lessons from Hayao Miyazaki far too often, I did not possess much skill in the language. Was I poor student? In the beginning, yes, and also in the middle, and admittedly somewhat at the end. My fascination with English led to fierce mental opposition when a new language entered my ears. However, just a semester before, I had attempted to rectify my high school sins and return to Japanese 101. Thus, my mouth opened.

“今日は！私の名前はリチャードです。初めまして！”

(Hello! I don’t know any Japanese really, but I also don’t possess whatever instinct deters people from talking to strangers)

My fellow passenger looked at me. He wore a tanned and wrinkled face, a cobalt blue snapback, and a jacket which declared him to be of some economic adequacy. I listened carefully for his response.

“One more time?” he said, cupping his hand to his ear.

“Oh,” I said, fluidly transitioning to my native vernacular. “I’m Richard. Nice to meet ya!”

He chuckled and grinned. Little did I know that this man would be my companion, my bedfellow (in Melville’s sense of the term), for the next eleven hours or so. After our brief introduction my attention returned to the plane, and the windows dimmed, each passenger somehow knowing that it was time for night, time for sleep, for shade and deflection of the sun, even though the hour was not even dinner time in San Diego. I wondered at how they knew to do this. Normal plane procedure? Or are each of the Japanese passengers connected through invisible cords on their necks which allow them to tap into some collective consciousness swimming above our seats? Remembering my mini-towel mini-fiasco, I figured they were just sleepy. (Not yet had I learned the power of that mystical tool, the 質問, or “question” as it is known).

A lady strolled up with a cart filled with snacks, drinks, and what the towelettes had heralded, our dinner. My compatriot received his meal, and then, gesturing towards one section of the cart, said something in Japanese containing the word “Yebisu.” A golden can of beer appeared on his tray. Catching my pique of interest at the beer, he spoke. “It’s Yebisu. You ever had one? They’re good.” I replied that I had not yet had one. “You should have one,” he said. I had one.

We talked for the remainder of the flight, both strategically positioned in a seat beside a passenger who possessed the level of intellect and manners necessary for a fine lick of conversation, both favorably sitting next to a person who would not be sleeping the entire plane ride. We talked about if I was a student?, that he was an engineer from Tokyo, the plane figure blipped across the pixely map on my personal seat monitor and we were now aligned with Hawaii. I watched Rogue One, he worked on something regarding earthquake preparedness on his laptop, we did the dance of “Hey, could I pee?” and “Oh yes, of course, I was going to pee too.” Talking to this man, I realized our conversation achieved a rhythm I have not since experienced on this trip. We lapsed into silence when we had nothing to say, and from that silence grew questions, which we parried back and forth, both listening and then responding with interest and deviation of the topic, neither wishing to disturb the other but both of us allies in the delicate transfer of information and also merely human sound.

“What do you think about tattoos?” he asked me.

They’re alright. I wouldn’t get one.

“What would your parents say if you got one, and are they indicators of one’s economic class in a sense?”

He told me of his Canadian colleague who had, to his surprise, revealed a rather large tattoo in an onsen they had visited, which his friend had acquired in the age of hippies. People don’t get tattoos in Japan, he explained, relating to me their association with the Japanese mafia, the Yakuza, which I will discuss my experience with in my next post.

“What about Christianity? Do people really interpret the Old Testament literally, that the world was created in seven days? Why do they still believe that?”

I frowned. To an educated man from a secular nation, in which questioning evolution might be paramount to questioning gravity, how could I explain the denial of Darwin? Thinking, I decided to enlighten him on the vast diversity of Christianity, the recent rise of socially liberal Christianity, and finally revealing that yeah well I don’t know why the seven days thing is still a thing.

“Fascinating,” he said.

Fascinating, I thought to myself, what a connection with this mere stranger who happened to sit next to me on the plane. Perhaps wing-sitting people think alike, with their heads in the clouds? Who knows.

When the little blinking plane on my seat monitor arrived in Tokyo bay, the sun was setting, and beaches stretched before us. Funny enough, I couldn’t discern that they were from Japan. Where is the foreignness? I thought to myself, but from this distance all the buildings and the houses and the eight-year old children looked indecipherable from my own, and squinting in the fading crimson light I couldn’t decipher my seatmate from any other interesting person I’d met in my life, either.

The seatbelts went on, the long runway sped below us like a cement river as we skipped over the track and then cruised into the airport, we awkwardly pulled down our bags and waited for the people in front of us to groggily go out into the dying sun’s last rays spilling into the tube that connects planes to airports. We walked together, the old man and I, to customs and immigration, laughing at the passengers who refused the wonderfully convenient speedy-walk-conveyor-belt things. Without my asking, he even directed me to the right counter for my national ID registration. We parted ways.

“Give me a call if you ever need any help in the city,” he said.

In my wallet, I still have his business card, and although I can’t read all of the kanji on it, I think I understand it in a way.