This is Words, Wit and Wanderings, a newsletter about Novels and poetry for a fifteen minute fiction fix.
Over-reaching, Over-intended Airport Madness
I am still in it, still swimming from side to side in the fishbowl full of angst, confusion, and oddly… peace.
I realize the cocktail of those concepts will take a bit to digest, but the hysterical response to the Omicron variant by the Japanese Health Ministry in a land populated with lovely people as capable of herd like hysteria as they are in finding tranquility in the simplicity of a moss laden lantern, is soul-sapping and mind boggling.
Before any heckles rise and screams of white privilege and foreign ingratitude and ignorance burst the paper lanterns of our floating world, let me lay a few tatami mats upon the floor from which I may bounce once the epithets begins to fly.
I am very well-travelled and have lived in (actually lived, not just visited) over a dozen countries. I am blessed with a Japanese partner and our sons are bi-cultural and multi-lingual.
I have lived and worked happily in Japan for almost a decade and still have an ability to butcher the language. (Grammar be Damned, it is the point that counts!) I have written five novels set in Japan. I hope this partially qualifies me as able to lose my rag and fume as fast as the other prisoners who were in the cell block with me, though I didn’t kick the garbage bags down the hall at the breakout point. I just wanted to get on the bus.
Leaving Barcelona on the fourth of December we were fully double vaccinated, ‘PCRed’, QR coded and primed for the trip. I was even more primed than most as I had fallen victim to a tooth abscess and my face was swelling faster than a fugu blowfish avoiding becoming a plate of sushi. I had painkillers, but no meds, I would get them in Japan at the airport as it proved impossible prior to departure. (Idiot!)
Leaving Barcelona we encountered an ill omen. The flight was delayed an hour because of heavy snow in Frankfurt. (Nnnn.) Previously we were allowed only had an hour and fifteen minutes for the transfer. I thought, ‘Not to worry the Lufthansa pilots would put the pedal to the metal or thruster to the buster whatever the aviation lingo is.’ (Wrong!)
Arriving in the transit tunnel off our Barcelona flight, our next flight was called for ‘last call.’ Damn, no time for schnitzel, not that my jaw would open to eat it. The cheek was now making me look like an otafuku ( a Japanese joke, the character is kind of like an old woman whose broad chin makes her look like an inverted top.) The flight — RUN!
After what was at least a 2km cross airport dash, we reached the flight counter, scrambled on board, and were met with a cornucopia of very pissed, but polite scowls. (Ah gotta love the Japanese ability to gaman — endure.)
As we approached Tokyo we were informed that our QR codes would not be enough and new documents, different from those handed out at the beginning of the flight were being distributed. This was our ‘pledge’ not to break quarantine and to always smile while enduring the processing. (A pledge? Really? Hmmm.)
As we disembarked, we were politely informed that our luggage does not run as fast as we do and would appear in three days. (Three! What, is it swimming over on its own?)
A moment for station identification: the nightmare begins now, so please turn away if you have a tendency to gnash your teeth, hurl small polite gnome-like attendants through windows, or bang your head against the wall.
Eight stations to be processed through, more corridors than a mathematical Escher drawing and the constant reiterating and presentation of the same documents to every counter and gnome in the airport. Did you want to eat something or grab a bottle of water? (Idiot! This is quarantine! No Insy! No Outsy!)
The saliva testing took only minutes, but the repeated paper examinations of every individual blossomed from one to two to four, then another QR download (better hope your Japanese is up to snuff there is no translation) and on to six hours. Seriously six hours! We were vaccinated in Japan before our trip to Barcelona. PCR tested in Barcelona and negative after the flight and yet we must present the documents over and over. The impenetrable glaze of demure calm was fast evaporating from every face, Japanese or foreign.
At last, we were assigned a hotel and then moved two meters from the assignment desk to a prescribed row of chairs that could only resemble a social distanced bus nestled beside the exhausted line of quarantine inmates standing beside us. (Right beside us!)
The quarantine bus was only a forty-five-minute ride, BUT, wait for it… because we have to go up the elevator one at a time, we have a two hour wait in the hotel underground parking with the six other half full buses. We are all negative!
There is no medical service at Haneda international airport, (we asked repeatedly and we are in quarantine so… No Insy, No Outsy) not even a doctor who could say, “Wow, Fat Face, you need some antibiotics.” A lot of pain at this point.
Finally, the crisp click of the hotel door. Well past nine in the evening and we had finally reached the room. Processing took just over eight and a half hours since we had landed. If another clerk had asked for my documents again, which I had presented more than fifteen times, I would have melted into a gibbering pool of fish eggs. Honestly the giant frozen tunas at Tsukiji market are processed faster. But a shower, a respectable room and bed at last. (Peace)
IDIOT! This is Japanese quarantine. No Insy! No Outsy! Worst of all no medication. Just time to wait.
Problems soon surfaced. Three packs of instant coffee for two people for three days. (YOU’RE JOKING RIGHT — 3!). Repeated calls for a nurse were answered by a qualified person in a hazmat suit carrying a bag of ice. Ice! I want meds! She said the abscess is serious but there is no medical service, but there is a bounty of ice at the end of the hall we just need to call someone from the front desk to come up, to walk down the hall, to get the ice. (What?!)
Sorry the hotel has over 2500 rooms, and you can’t call a doctor? Hell, I would accept a vet!
This is quarantine. NO Insy…. I know, I know. I thought to attempt a runner down the hall to the ice machine. NO way, you can’t step across the threshold of your room. Really?
They have citizen hall patrols clad with masks, gloves and shields. The threat is that you will be publicly shamed in the media if you break quarantine.
We have tested negative three times in 72 hours.
But one mustn’t be acidic toward the hand that feeds. The lunches and dinners were delightful. The room was immaculate and more than accommodating. Well done APA Hotels.
You may wonder how could I eat with my screaming headache and locked jaw?
A solution was found when my wife convinced my Tokyo dentist, through photos, that her husband was becoming an even more heinous looking individual. The dentist wrote a prescription to my wife, my son picked it up (posing as his mother), drove from Tokyo to our Yokohama quarantine hotel and dropped the medication at the front desk. Five hours later and half a dozen phone calls, it was brought from the front desk to the room by another hazmat suit. (Maybe the package of antibiotics had to go through the same document presentations, although amazon was making deliveries — go figure.)
After more than three days we were tested again at seven in the morning. The test takes about an hour to discern whether you have a form of suspect Covid or not. We were to be transported at 2 pm. Our son waited at the airport as no one was allowed to be picked up at the hotel. We had to go back to the airport and walk across the parking lot to our transport home. (It can’t be public transport, better hope you have a relative or a few hundred bucks for a private car hire. Yet the previous army of processing attendants had suddenly disappeared. We just sauntered out.)
Now our ten-day home quarantine has begun. We have a tracker app they call two or three times a day to check location. There is also a health check and a video call. Daily!
Is there a positive lesson in this? Numbers I suppose.
Contracted Covid cases in Japan 145 on December 12th
Population of 126 million
Fully double vaccinated 76%
Is there a painful lesson?
Don’t fly with an abscess.
Well-intended regulations or directives when blindly administered by faceless distant desks lead to manic ill-coordinated and ultimately dangerous situations that can thwart the very purpose for which they were intended. I witnessed frustrations boil over leading to yelling matches, restraints, garbage kicking and property abuse.
I sincerely hope the quarantine authorities will view the madness on the ground and streamline the processing before there is a death from exhaustion or a murder.
Credits for surviving this nightmare movie go to; family, dentists, ever-patient processing clerks, and APA hotel for some great food and accommodations supplied to thousands of passengers who were tested beyond the parameters of mere COVID.
Stay safe, stay vaccinated, stay calm or just…. Stay put!
Cheers, chilling in Japan. Hope you enjoyed the read.
Kevin
Blind trust in political directives is what led the lemming herds to the cliff face.