Tokyo Airport

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Writing from an airport in a travel blog feels odd. I'm required to specify from where I'm writing, and naturally then had to select, in order, Asia, Japan, Narita . . . . but that doesn't seem to describe this place. I feel embarassed now, like a traveler who shamefully counts the airport as a visited location. Airports are wonderful indeed - giant machine-cities, churning out travelers like fabrege factories, forever kinetic, forever static. Always alive in monotonous motion.

Here in Narita I can feel myself getting closer to destination. Approximately 20 hours ago I said goodbye to my parents and lugged two bags and a guitar up to the American Airlines (rahrah Snyle) international check-in counter in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The flight to Dallas was standard. Boarding the Dallas-Tokyo flight (which I barely made) took on a distinctly international feel. Like the context in which it existed - that is, an airport - the herd of trans-pacific travelers boarding flight 74whatever represented both everywhere and nowhere. We were a hodgepodge bastard of a race - not the fluid group of multi-racial cosmopolitans one might abstractly half-expect on an intercontinental flight, but an integrated mass of hostile genetic codings, a cess-pool of misunderstanding - a testament to the limits of so-called "globalization." It was - forgive the hyperbole - beautiful. Exiting in Tokyo the facial features of my fellow temporary citizens of Narita Airport took a distintly Eastern turn. Hair black and straight, Asiatic eyes, and a confounding meekness among beautiful Japanese girls passed by while walking through the terminal. Here, at gate 61, awaiting the final flight, Tokyo-Manila, my orientation has truly begun. Skin tones are darker, while the hair among most people here lacks the dramatic straightness of the Japanese crowd just upstairs. Here, as we have traveled further "East" (West really, but I'll allow the judeo-christian-centric cognitive regionalisms) the influence of the West in Filipino culture is striking. I am noticeably more comfortable here, sitting next to these stranges, sharing the occasional laugh at the antics of small children, than I was upstairs among Japanese airport employees, in the quick moment of purchasing a fat sushi roll and some cold "cajun potato fries." A woman, probably a mother, gives that universal warning, both stern and dismissive, to a Filipino toddler, and in so doing gives me my first taste of Tagalog in at least a decade. He answers in perfect American toddler-English. Gate 61 is a testament to the profound influence of so-called "globalization."

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