This is Japan!

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After a surprisingly short-feeling flight, filled with enough time for me to watch THREE movies (Einstein & Eddington, Green Zone, and Date Night), eat TWO meals (Bibimbap? Bimimbap? Can’t remember how to say it but it was a delicious Korean spicy rice dish), and try to take ONE nap (and failing), I emerged out of the plane doors into the oppressive heat of East Japan.
After stumbling my way through Immigration, I came into what looked like a completely deserted baggage claim. I felt as if my plane had accidentally flown to the wrong Japanese airport. ‘Isn’t this Tokyo?’ I thought. ‘Aren’t people supposed to be everywhere??’ But looking at the incoming flights list, we were the only plane in this part of the airport.
I’m standing there bemused, and I hear a small, nervous voice ask “Are you in JSP?” I turn around and standing there is Deanna. I say that I am, and we start talking. It seems I’m not the only one who’s nervous about the placement test for the Japanese classes. She pulls a huge suitcase off the conveyor belt, as do I, but when I turn to go she says she’s got more stuff. Soon she pulls off another suitcase (smaller, but still biggish), and protests that her mom made her over-pack. I agree with her, while simultaneously wondering if I, in fact, under-packed.
We go through customs, and the woman asks me if I have anything to declare. I don’t totally understand this procedure with seems to be more of a formality: if they don’t actually check your bag, then how would they know if I’m smuggling diamonds or not?
After about 5 minutes of walking in a generally correct direction, I get tapped on the shoulder and an American voice says “Rowan?” I guess I’m easy to spot. I turn around and it’s Matt Lindley, the Japan Studies Program Coordinator! Wow, it’s absurd but I’m already missing Americans, so his face is good to see… He introduces us to Ashly, another JSP student. She’s fun and talkative too, so we start gabbing away about stuff. She goes to Occidental College (somewhere I would have gone if I had not gotten into USC, most likely), and, like me, she is not very proficient in Japanese. Yes, strength in numbers!
Soon Colin shows up: He’s from D.C. and flew out of New York, which means he’s even more tired than the rest of us. He seems pretty nervous about being in Japan finally, at which point I realize that I’m not nearly as nervous as I should be. Yay!
We get on a bus for a 2(TWO) hour ride to Kawagoe. As we leave the airport area, the bus driver starts rattling off a bunch of instructions that I didn’t ever fully understands. He keeps talking for easily the next 15 minutes, and halfway through I started to wonder if part of the bus ride service was just the bus driver reading us a book to pass the time. He repeated many things he said, including “Please don’t talk loudly on your cell phones” about 5 times. During this book reading, Ashley and I met David, another person for Occidental and now JSP student who was sitting behind us. Of course, we proceeded as the noisy gaijin (literally, outside person, or foreigner) to get way too loud, at which point the bus driver told us to quiet down. Oops, first faux pas accomplished.
We still had a long way to go, and Ashly was aghast that we weren’t able to talk on such a long bus ride, so we busted out my laptop and started watching Lost In Translation. I’ve never seen it before, and therefore it was incredibly fitting that, as we watched the beginning of the film, Bill Murray and I were both looking out the windows of vehicles and seeing Tokyo whiz by for the first time.
We ran out of battery after a while, which was for the best because I was getting pretty sick: we had hit stop-and-go traffic since we started watching and I was left feeling not so good.
Finally, we pulled up to Kawagoe Station, got out, and were greeted by Shun and another girl who’s name my utterly destroyed brain failed to compute. They led us up and elevator, through a bustling train station, down an elevator, across a warren of cris-crossing streets and finally down an alley to our hotel, the Kawagoe Dai-Ichi Hotel. We got our rooms keys and split for a few minutes before heading out again (!) for dinner.
My room is tiny. And it’s operated by key!! Like a car! Whoa! As I turned the key the first time, my room whirred to life, A/C revved up, and lights flicked on. ‘This is a strange future,’ I thought, ‘but it’s definitely the future.’

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Photos

Lonely Plane
Only plane in the baggage claim.

Me!
...and Ashly

Fields
Reminds me of Totoro...

My tiny hotel room
TINY. Literally TINY.