Go west young man pt 2

By the time the plane was circling Narita Airport outside of Tokyo, we had been "traveling" for over 50 hours. I was miserable, in some of the worst pain I had ever experienced. As the plane descended and the atmospheric pressure increased, my ears would not clear and it felt like my head was in a vice; In growing horror, I felt doomed and desperately hoped my ears would clear SOON. I swallowed and yawned and prayed and finally, just before the wheels touched down on the runway and I felt I was going to scream and scream and scream, my ears popped very painfully. I looked around to see if anyone got splattered and realized that I could hear again and that my wife was very worried.

The first time I stepped on Japanese soil was painful. And we still had hours of travel before we got "home", to my wife’s family home in Kobe. Had our flight, the one we were scheduled on. arrived in Japan, it would have been at Osaka, hundreds of miles southwest of Narita and a car ride home. The airline had gotten us to Japan, and they got us on a domestic flight, along with 2 dozen other people from our flight., but we were still way off schedule.

Some of us had formed our own clique; we were or were going to be, Gai-Jin, foreigners,  in Japan. I had a guide; my wife was Japanese, and were we were not unique; there were other mixed couples in our group. We spent a few hours touring Narita, looking at all the people; more foreign faces than I had ever seen. Airports are less than distinctive; the food court in one looks much like anywhere else, and so I was less than fully prepared to BE in Japan.

We got on the connecting flight and flew to Osaka, about an hour’s flight and touched down in Osaka. We waited and found our check-on bags and went through my first experience of entering a completely different country than my own. It wasn’t too hard; the Customs and Immigration agent asked me questions in Japanese and then switched to passable English when he saw I didn’t understand. It was a pretty low-stress, in 1985, and I was soon on my way to meet my wife and to meet her parents for the first time. We had been married close to two years by then.

I had seen pictures and I had been practicing for this meeting. I could say "Hello, my name is Kurt. Please look upon me favorably" which is a stock greeting in Japan. I was not going to be The Ugly American, but when I saw her parents, I knew who they were and walked up and said my practiced sentence and bowed. We went outside and her dad went to get the car.

Japan!  Wow!

And, I could barely read a word of anything. There were big neon signs with collections of English letters on them, but they didn’t form words, they said SONY and JVC. Most everything else was incomprehensible in Japanese characters – I had learned that there were three different syllabries of symbols in use in Japan, plus the English alphabet. Also disorienting, especially after 8 weeks of driving across the US, was that the cars drove on the other side of the road. When her dad walked us out to the waiting car, he gestured for me to get in the driver’s seat – or what would be here.

It was a kind of terrifying ride out of the airport and onto the toll way, sitting like I was in the imaginary driver’s seat and having no controls at all. And the traffic! We never seemed to go faster than about 45 mph, but there was nowhere to go; the cars were packed around us, on skinny elevated highways above endless tiled rooftops. Japan is more densely populated than I had ever seen, and to my eyes, there was no sign of Nature except in the High jagged peaks of the Japanese Alps close above the city.

We got off the highway and down onto surface roads and aimed towards "home". That would later become a welcome sight, after I started driving there, but the first time was into a totally different world than I thought I knew, but did only barely. The streets were very small by my standards, and the other cars uncomfortably close. My father in law turned into a maze of seemingly impossibly narrow streets and stopped in front of a house on a corner.

We got out and got our bags out and dogs barked at us and the family pooch ran into his dog house as my father in law pulled past the garage and backed into the closet – sized space for the car; I had never seen such smooth driving in such tight quarters before and clapped as I saw it. We already had a love of cars and of driving between us, he and I, something that attracted my wife to me, no doubt, but the car parked so smoothly I couldn’t restrain myself… and by that time, we had been travelling for 3 days non-stop.

***

Of course, I had to meet everyone; my wife’s father and mother and her sister.  I was the American that the house’s daughter had brought home form America.  No one but my wife spoke anything but Japanese.  I didn’t speak much more than the words I had learned driving across country, but there were no horses or sheep or lambs to be seen, and I was speechless.  Questions flew at my wife and she would turn to me and translate and I would answer her, to be translated and told to the family, and it was all very noisy and not unhappy.  There is no sound in Japanese that makes my name; I became Kato right then.

In the midst of all the commotion, the family cat, a large Tiger-Stripped Tomcat sit in the next room and looked at us all, and at me, the new addition to the family.  He rose on all fours and stretched, his back arching up and his boldly striped tail curling languidly above him.  He looked at me and walked towards me, the family chattering and my wife saying "he’s a very stand off-ish cat.  He’ll probably just sniff you and walk away".

The room got quiet suddenly as the "stand off-ish" cat leaped into my lap and curled up, purring loudly.

The real head of the family had just given me his approval.

*****