A Painful Passage to India - Part 2

So there we both were at the packed departure lounge for Calcutta at Dubai Airport, spaced out and drained from the first leg and six-hour linger, having then searched for a wheelchair for less-mobile mum and now waiting for the first boarding announcement.

Usually the airline lets those in wheelchairs and carrying babies board first but a major hindrance had materialised: a large number of passengers had decided to not so much as queue before the gate as form an impenetrable crowd of bodies and baggage blocking the way for whoever was called first.

Now I could understand the thinking behind this approach if we were about to board a Ryanair short-hop with unallocated seating, when many flyers customarily want first dibs on seats to the extent that they'll start queuing long before boarding, and if you want to guarantee a seat next to your partner then you have join the line.

However, on a long-haul flight with pre-allocated seats, when they call you on incrementally in specific row sections, there is actually zero point in queuing early unless you somehow knew they were calling your seats first. Just standing blank-faced like cows waiting for milking, and then of course refusing to budge when the announcement arrives for rows A to C to please begin boarding.

easy boarding - not realistic

Naturally, those holding the correct tickets can’t get past the unmoving mass, some of whom at the front have the cheek to try walking through anyway, then look affronted when told it’s not their turn by the gate attendant.

And then, to make matters nicely worse, instead of sensibly rectifying the situation with a polite yet firm announcement for everyone to just back away from the gate until your section's been called, the airline then announces for rows D to G to begin boarding, after the previous rows have very visibly been unable to get through.

Hell breaks loose as a mini stampede piles through, Bengali curses and exclamations ringing out as people get shunted. All mum and I can do is hang back shaking our heads at the sheer needless idiocy of it all - I regret not recording the scene with my camera to create a realistic anti-advert for the airline and air travel in general.

flight welcome - not realistic

Once we’d finally scrambled onto the jumbo the bad luck continued. The only thing that had kept me alert and sane on the previous flight was the entertainment screen with games and movies on demand. On this one the screen was too small and hazy and you could only watch what they had chosen at the times they choose. Stuck with an obscure film I could barely see or hear on a much noisier flight, I wasn’t a happy camper.

The only thing that could alleviate the situation was a semi-decent in-flight meal as the extended wakefulness and previous missions had triggered some major rumbles. A dragged-out feed could also kill the best part of an hour too, but it would have to be something soft-ish as my swollen jaw couldn’t handle anything harder than a banana. At long last it arrived.

Lamb medallions - the airline version, ie. having sat around for so long their consistency was closer to pencil erasers than meat. Unable to chew them without wincing and clasping my face, that was the moment I hit rock bottom, 30,000 feet above the Arabian Sea. All my options had dried up. Nothing left could lighten my spirits while trapped in that seat – I couldn’t even drink alcohol as I was on so many antibiotics and feeling rough as fuck. I did try though, and funnily enough it didn’t help.

After managing to scrape together a mini-meal from the limp side vegetables, condiment sachets and mum's donations I had to ride out the rest of the flight playing a primitive version of Battleships on a tiny fuzzy screen that kept freezing, broken up only by an old Bollywood flick with no subtitles.

hahaha

I spent the last two hours sat motionless with my eyes closed, praying for the release of sleep that wouldn’t arrive until we’d landed and made it out of the airport and back to the hotel. Needless to say that part didn’t go particularly smoothly either but that’s a different story to recount another time, along with the more positive sides to India that weren’t mired in chaos.

In that first jerky hour-long cab ride through central Calcutta however, what should've been an entertaining eye-opening welcome to the city’s bustle seemed like the shrieking road to hell, a ceaseless barrage of noise, fumes and gridlock traffic, emaciated figures looming up at the window at every standstill, mutely begging us captive passengers for currency we didn’t yet possess.

It put things into perspective though – my immediate problems of oral pain, hunger and sleep deprivation would have receded by the next day, the jaw a little longer, although that would be superseded by the affliction cursing most Western visitors here, of which I won’t need to go into much detail.

My hardy mum also needed to dialyse every other day at local hospitals while experiencing the same, struggling with the nature of the beast of a modern-day urban India completely at odds with the more serene memories of her childhood here.

Kris Griffiths BBC link  Kris Griffiths Contently  Kris Griffiths recent disaster story

A Painful Passage to India: Part 1

I’ve had some great luck on flights over the years. For my very first long-haul, to LA in the mid-90s, my fam and I were jammily upgraded to business class after my dad’s winning banter with the check-in clerk.

Then in early 2011 I hit it off with a ginger girl sat beside me on a budget flight to Marrakech, telling her she reminded me of Catherine Tate with her Easyjet-orange hair, a bold negging gambit that paid off as we're still together (and she looks nothing like Catherine Tate).

It's not all been good though. A domestic flight to Inverness in 2004 was interrupted halfway by the pilot announcing that due to an “engine fault” we had to turn back to London immediately. Not only was that return descent as trepidatious as can be, we had to wait hours to get back into the air and no one was compensated.

Finally, a night-flight to Tokyo in 2009 turned into a bizarre battle of endurance with the paranoid Japanese man next to me, which ended worse for him than it did for me.

All of them were blown out of the sky though by my Emirates flight to Calcutta last month, during which I reached a nadir of despair that was to become a harbinger of my stay in India.

The prologue to it all is that I’d actually been looking forward to the trip for months, to be finally visiting my Anglo-Indian mum's hometown (she'd not returned since childhood) and to meet at the triennial global reunion in Calcutta hundreds of fellow Anglo-Indians whose dying community I’d just featured for the BBC.

The first major spanner in the works was that a long-dormant impacted wisdom tooth had suddenly chosen to unleash a siren-wailing level of pain in the months leading up to the trip. My dentist told me it had to come out and booked me in for the extraction – four days before the flight.

The op wasn't that bad, the only truly grim moment a preliminary injection penetrating my gum almost to the jawbone, but it was nothing compared to the ensuing days of swelling, inability to eat and ultimately a rank infection necessitating further injections back into the wound.

dentist website photo - a bit unrealistic

By the time I’d arrived at Gatwick with my mum I’d taken over 50 painkillers in five days as well as a triple-course of antibiotics and now a long stretch of anti-malaria pills which, as many will affirm, can make you feel nauseous for hours.

My final problem was that as I can’t sleep on planes the first seven-hour night-leg was spent awake and aware of a new development – altitude pressure causing extraction-wound throbbing. Then after landing in Dubai there were six hours to kill before the connecting flight, so into the bright morning we traipsed, looking for a taxi we could haggle with a handful of old dollars and a five-pound note to drive us round the sights and keep us alert 'til check-in.

classic brave face

Funnily enough we found an Indian driver seduced by the fiver of all things who agreed to take us on a whistle-stop tour of the Burj al-Arab and Khalifa. It was trippy enough beholding these behemoths jet-lagged in blazing sunshine having left freezing dark England ten hours previously, but by the time the next busy departure lounge swam into view five hours later, that’s when things really, really started to get shit.

Continued in part 2: Dubai to Calcutta

Japan: Tokyo - the city

Unsurprisingly after such a bizarre, sleepless flight I was feeling pretty spaced while waiting at the baggage carousel, then undergoing the rigorous immigration control, keeping my eye out for Ken in case he was on the verge of collapse again. My own problems began when I arrived at the airport's subway station and had to work out how to get to my hostel in the centre of the city during morning rush hour.

Toky Subway Map (translated)

Unless you’ve assiduously studied the language before arriving, Japanese is indecipherable because of the script it’s written in, symbols not letters, so you can’t look anything up in a phrasebook. And the untranslated Tokyo subway map didn't have the most simple design, just a jumble of coloured spaghetti. Thankfully though, once you’ve made it through the gates armed with the correct ticket, you find that one of the few things in Tokyo written in Roman script is the station name at each stop, in smaller letters beneath the Japanese ones, for the benefit of Westerners. Without them we’d be in trouble.

It took nearly two hours to reach central Tokyo on a rapid bullet train, which is testament to the city’s size, and which is why I specifically booked a hostel right in the centre, as it’s better to be in the middle moving outwards than vice versa. More on Tokyo’s hugeness later. For now, I had a fresh problem to face, namely that I couldn’t check in to the hostel until 2.30pm, so had to walk the streets for the next four hours after dumping my rucksack there. Having just experienced the long trippy flight, this next stretch of time was to become even trippier for the very reason that I hadn’t slept on it and not much the night before that, had drunk copiously, and was now thrust into an alien world of futuristic skyscrapers overhead and dense swarms of Japanese pedestrians at ground level. 

bullet train

the trains sometimes travel so quickly that passengers lose consciousness

Shinjuku, the central district I found myself in, is Tokyo’s main commercial centre, housing the busiest train station in the world (more than 3.5m people passing through it daily last year. Clapham Junction incidentally is the world’s busiest based on the number of trains passing through it). It would be overwhelming to first experience Shinjuku in well-slept sobriety let alone the opposite state. I started to see Ken appearing in random places, in restaurant windows, on buses and billboards, once on a street corner waving a joypad at me. I hastened back to the hostel with an hour left on the clock, convinced he was in fact some kind of spectre, that the seat beside me on the plane had been empty and I would now be haunted for the rest of my trip by this gaming phantom. 

too many people

Mercifully the receptionist clocked the look in my eyes and let me in early. I stumbled upstairs to my dorm, crawled straight into my capsule without pause and passed out. Two hours later I was awoken by voices murmuring in Japanese and opened my eyes to find myself inside a large coffin. After a few frozen seconds I recalled that I’d checked into a capsule hostel and that this was my room for the next five days. With living-space at a premium in central Tokyo capsules are popular, cheaper accommodation, but are pretty disorientating the first time you wake up in one, and definitely not for the claustrophobic. 

A space-hogger taking the piss by dangling his leg out
He was reported immediately to management

For me, the enclosed cocoons would prove a far better option than standard hostel bunks as you at least had a degree of privacy with the blind pulled. They didn’t prove to be much of a sound dampener though against the constant racket of backpackers coming and going, and as I would painfully find out: dormitories are no place for a light sleeper.

I peered out of my pod to survey the 28-capsule dorm, just as a fresh bunch of Europeans boisterously piled in. There was no way I was going to sleep any further in there so, despite my brain crying out for REM, I was forced to bail and hit the streets again until nightfall and conventional bedtime.


A sci-fi monster

If Shinjuku was surreal by day, once darkness falls it hits a new level of visual and aural pandemonium to which photos can't really do justice: a postmodern world of brilliant neon, animated billboards and pounding loudspeakers, requiring only Star Wars-style mini spaceships whistling around the buildings to complete the effect. ‘Hyperreal’ is a term used to describe central Tokyo; also ‘The Big Japple’. Piccadilly Circus is like an average street corner here – London's Japanese tourists must laugh when they first see it. 

And like Piccadilly Circus on a wider scale, there is both motor and human traffic everywhere you look but in far greater quantities; masses of humanity sweeping along the main thoroughfares and arterial side streets branching off in all directions. At major pedestrian intersections like Hachiko Square, the crowds coagulate at the crossroads waiting patiently for the green light then flood out into the square in a 4-way cross-walk. There are 13m people, almost twice London’s entire population, in Tokyo’s core metropolitan area alone, which is the nucleus of the most densely populated urban area in the world, Greater Tokyo (total population 35m). 


The sheer size of the monster only became fully apparent in the stark daylight of the following morning when I went to the top of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, the city’s tallest building at 250m. Stepping into the top floor’s observation deck it hits home that Tokyo is more a vast megalopolis – several cities merged into one – sprawling outwards in an ocean of concrete as far as the eye can see. Whereas capital cities generally have only one centre, here you can see several sprouting upwards in scattered clusters of new skyscrapers. It’s an awesome sight to behold, and a daunting prospect to attempt exploring the whole of it within the time-frame of five days. 

Tokyo Metropolitan Govt Building

front door

inside foyer

at the top


But that’s what I had set out to do that very morning. The night before I'd crawled back into my capsule at 8pm and as expected woke up at the ridiculous hour of 4am, fully charged and raring to go while the rest of the hostel and neighbourhood remained in repose and in darkness. One benefit of the jet lag was having the run of the green at the breakfast area and internet stations, congested at all other times, so I could blitz my emails and photo downloads at leisure over some green tea and rice crackers. Then when 7am rolled around I hit the streets with the first throngs of early commuters to recommence my adventures. Thankfully Ken made no further appearances. 

Having been warned to avoid the subway during rush hour I spent the whole day just wandering wherever the roads took me following my ascent to the top of the Metropolitan building as soon as it opened at 8am, handily bypassing the queues and crowds that the day progressively attracts. After resolving not to read any guidebooks and just go with the flow, my marathon walk took me away from the built-up high-tech hubs and through glimpses of old Japan in the form of ancient shrines and the imperial gardens of Chiyoda. Fortuitously one shrine was holding a colourful pageant the day I turned up, which made for some cool snaps: 


However the roads always eventually led back to more skyscraper constellations, some even more futuristic than Shinjuku’s, like the lustrous steel edifices of Shiodome and the pioneering Asahi and Fuji HQs. I later learnt that the buildings are all so new and innovatively architectured because most of the older ones were destroyed by the great earthquake of 1923, and any remaining ones finished off by Allied bombs in WWII. It’s doubly impressive to behold how such a gleaming metropolis rose from the ashes of complete destruction within half a century. 

Shiodome skyscraper, looks like a sword

Fuji's futuristic HQ, straight out of a sci-fi flick 

Asahi Beer HQ, in the shape of a pint, complete with strange giant sculpture


Quirks and oddities of the Japanese way

One of the greatest benefits of strolling around a city independently at your own pace is that you observe and absorb more of its social vibe. Pausing to sit and read on a bench or have a coffee at an al-fresco café takes much longer here as the people-watching is such good value. I picked up on many things that are done completely differently.

I’ll get the niggling stuff out of the way first. Firstly, during the warm spring afternoons of my visit, I and evidently thousands of office workers wanted to escape the concrete and traffic and retreat into one of the city’s numerous parks for an hour, however here you have to pay to enter them, which often means long queues and waits, killing the spontaneity of ducking into a park for a stroll or lunch break. Ok, it’s only a couple of quid, but the principle is a bit rotten – imagine a high brick wall erected around Regent's Park or Clapham Common so you can’t actually see it from the outside, being forced to line up and pay for that privilege? Fortunately the Imperial Gardens around the Imperial Palace are free for all, but that of course means they’re packed like an unending music festival. 

ridiculous park queue

That was my main beef really. There were other niggles that can annoy you if you let them, for instance as a smoker you’re not allowed to smoke anywhere on the high street – you must stand at designated smoking stations into which scores of people can often be seen cramming, emitting a collective pall of smoke above their heads. Conflictingly though, you can smoke in McDonald's, effectively reducing the place to an ‘enter at your peril’ den of health crimes.

There are other inconsistencies with regards to manners and protocol. This is a country where most people's etiquette is impeccable, where maintaining ‘face’ is paramount, the streets are clean, and anything that sullies the outlook like littering, smoking or begging is cracked down upon (I saw a few homeless drunks shambling about but never daring to beg). People here customarily wear surgical-style masks, not because of pollution but because they have a cold or hay fever and don’t want to afflict others with their germs. 

However some things considered socially unacceptable in the West are completely permissible in Japan, eg. noisily coughing up whatever’s on your chest. A couple of times, while sitting at a bar or waiting for a bus, a man beside me would clear his throat with the violence of someone trying to eject a hairbrush trapped in his windpipe. No one else in the vicinity batted an eyelid. Meanwhile, during lunch hour in noodle bars, diners slurp down their ramen with the noise and urgency of speed-eating contestants, like their lives depended on not going one second over their lunch breaks. If you close your eyes at the right moment it can sound like a roomful of sinks emptying simultaneously. 

patient queuers - spot the hay fever sufferer

On a bit of a darker subject, there is something quite creepy about the sheer abundance of pornography on shop shelves devoted to barely legal Japanese schoolgirls, much of which is perused so casually by men old enough to be their dads. It also ties in with the craze of vending machines, which due to sheer consumer demand are everywhere and sell everything, from batteries and umbrellas to eggs and live fish; and yes, knickers – I didn’t encounter any myself but saw a photo of one on a hosteller’s camera (they're actually illegal now). One good thing about the machines is that they don’t charge the excessive mark-up prices you’d expect and are very handy for when the local shops close and you fancy a beer or noodle soup. 

24-hour beer machine - convenient

many restaurants display plastic replicas of their menu in the window - weird but handy if you wanna know exactly what you're getting


Other behavioural quirks on wide display in Tokyo are the kind of things you see on TV and online so much that they become a cliché, which makes witnessing it first hand all the more significant. Firstly, rush hour trains are truly insane. Stuck as I was in a jet lag cycle of rising at unnaturally early hours meant that for a couple of days I couldn’t avoid it as I needed to get to another part of the city. Londoners may complain about crowded trains but here they stuff you into the carriages so tightly that you can sometimes only move your head and fingers, before prising yourself back onto the platform at your stop gasping for breath.

It’s the way it has to be in a city of 13m – the trains can’t arrive any faster than they do anywhere else, so the swelling crowds have to be squeezed into every inch of space, with uniformed crammers assigned to the task. I loved the collective passivity of the commuters inured to it all, a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare, which for me was the most memorable aspect of the culture shock.

Another cliché that’s evidently true is that the Japanese photograph everything, in their own country too. Their hard drives at home must creak with the millions of photo files stuffed into them. The bustle triggered by the sight of a large dog being walked was pretty comical, with pedestrians halting to rummage for their phones. I guess the tiny shoebox apartments in which most Tokyoites live precludes them from keeping dogs bigger than a pug, so seeing a Great Dane is akin to spotting a rhino in London.


Safe city, cool people

Tokyo has one of the world's lowest crime rates, so you feel safe wherever you are, even in the sleazier parts. There’s a pervading sense of discipline, no lager louts or druggies hanging about anywhere. The youth are mostly modest and respectful types whose chief preoccupation seems to be their appearance – everyone dresses stylishly, almost too stylishly, with strong Western influences. I was saddened to discover though, as in every capital I later visited, so many youngsters rocking the same drainpipes-with-arse-exposed look. 

Another interesting demographical point is that the entire population of Tokyo seems to be 99% Japanese or SE Asian, with only a smattering of caucasians, blacks or hispanics. Yet you don’t see many national flags flying compared with other Western capitals, possibly as if the guilt of its warmongering past has repressed any sense of patriotism. But modern Japan has so much to be proud of – Tokyo the living embodiment of it, the vanguard of technological innovation illuminating a clean and safe urban environment. 

only one shopper spotted the mystery photographer

they love their 'Pachinko' slot machines

Ginza skyline

Some visitors complain about expensiveness, but it isn’t that much different from London or Paris, where if you explore beyond the tourist traps you’ll find places that don’t decimate your budget. One thing I did note was that concerts were prohibitively dear, charging to see an Idlewild club gig the price of seeing Muse at Wembley. Booze also one of the pricier commodities, so I didn’t do much drinking, conscious also that I was headed for the livelier Bangkok the following week. The only waterholes I visited were hotel and jazz bars where I sat with a whisky affecting sophistication like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, watching another pianist crooning “fry me to the moon”. 

And on the subject of ‘Engrish’, it was always entertaining chatting to locals who were keen to practice theirs – to be able to speak English at conversational level is seen to be ‘cool’. One hostel dweller from Osaka told me to look out for the "brootiful cherry brossom" around the city, which I did see a lot of, and it was indeed brootiful. 

chelly brossom

spot the yawn


Couple of textbook examples of Engrish I encountered: 



A conclusion

My final couple of days were spent on random pursuits like visiting the hectic squirmfest that is the world’s biggest fish market at Tsukiji, where forklift drivers speed around a hangar-sized warehouse filled with crates of every variety of seafood – some still flapping around in blood, and tentacles dangling menacingly over the sides. I also attended an auction of giant tunas which looked like miniature missiles. That evening I sated my inner gamer nerd at Akihabara aka Electric Town, home to the famous 8-Bit Café celebrating the glory days of Sega Master System and Megadrive. 


And so randomly concluded my week in the hyperreal other world of Tokyo. As much as I was awed by what I saw, it was also kind of relieving to leave a city that makes you feel almost insignificant, especially if you’re on your own, a tiny moving part in a giant finely-tuned machine of a billion smaller components functioning as efficiently as each day before – maybe not so efficiently in recent times of recession but it’ll soon hit optimum performance again. And the nature of the beast is that because everything is so densely packed within, it must be meticulously disciplined to prevent malfunction and shutdown. 

It’s an overwhelming experience for the lone traveller with only a week to play with but still a fascinating snapshot of an eccentric culture, and a compelling glimpse into the future, of how megalopolises will all look and function one day. To maximise the experience I’d advise visiting with a partner (as long as they’re ok with crowds and enclosed spaces), allow for a bigger budget, and prepare for a culture shock you won’t be forgetting in a hurry. 

And whatever you do, don’t take the tube during rush hour. 

Japan: Tokyo - the flight

“Travel and change of scenery impart new vigour to the mind” - Seneca

I was actually feeling pretty far from vigorous as my mate dropped me off at Heathrow Airport and left me standing before the huge Terminal 3 building where, after what seemed like a whole year of constant planning and preparation, my seven-month walkabout would finally begin. The significance of the moment was dulled by the fact that a) I had inevitably not slept much the previous night, consumed with both excitement and anxiety, and knew I wouldn’t sleep at all on the imminent 12-hour night flight; and b) it felt like there was a small building strapped to my back which was seriously warping my spine when I walked.

The rucksack had felt heavy during its first foray onto my shoulders in my flat but I convinced myself I’d get used to it. Now though, lurching unnaturally through the busy terminal, I quickly realised that I wouldn’t make it past the first of ten countries like this, without a square centimetre of room to accumulate anything new.

Having to pack for seven months of life I discovered straight away what would become the most burdensome weight culprits: chargers for a start, infuriating but unavoidable if you want to use your camera, phone and mp3 player beyond the first week. Next, a suit that I’d probably only wear thrice at the most for job interviews. And finally: books, anticipating the abundance of reading time I’d have on transport, beaches and bunk beds. [Postscript: this was unluckily just before the emergence of weight-and-space-saving Kindles.]

A fortnight into my travels I shipped home a big box of stuff I was dumb enough to pack in the first place: the suit was the first thing in there, followed by a couple of books I suddenly didn’t like the sound of. For now though, at the airport and for the first two weeks, I would have to shoulder the weight, which only just checked in under the max kg limit. I waved it off gladly as it trundled away on the conveyor.

“There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror” - Orson Welles

There is actually a lot of fun to be had on a Virgin Atlantic jumbo to Japan. In fact, the fun had begun at the booze section in the duty-free shop, where someone had had the inspired idea of setting up a whisky bar where you could sample a free half-shot of any whisky on sale in the shop to help you ‘decide’.

“I actually write for a whisky magazine,” was my opening gambit at the bar to set out my stall. “So I’d love to sample some of these bottles” I added, pointing vaguely at some shelves. The impassive young bartender dutifully complied, pouring out almost a full shot from four different bottles, as good as challenging me to down them all. The challenge was met head-on – each was hastily necked, before I made an exaggerated “ooh, is that the time?” gesture with my watch and hotstepped off to the boarding gate. 

So by the time I’d shoe-horned myself into my economy seat on the plane, I was already aglow from the whisky sluice, suddenly ‘up for it’. The same couldn’t be said for the thirty-something expressionless Japanese man in the seat next to me, who had grunted uncomprehendingly when I asked how he was doing. 

Gonna be a long flight I thought, before it dawned on me the extent of the entertainment options before me. I’d only ever flown one long-haul flight before, 14 years previously, and was unaware of how things had progressed since then, that nowadays major airlines’ seats come with in-seat screen entertainment systems as standard, offering a multitude of recent movies to watch when you want, plus retro video games to thumb-bash your way through. 

When the stewardess offered the first of numerous gratis drinks I felt made up. Granted, an upgrade would’ve been a welcome start to my travels on its longest flight but as it turned out long-haul economy class wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected.

It was a shame that my aforementioned Japanese neighbour didn’t appear quite as contented; every time I glanced at his screen he was scrolling through the same section on flight safety and emergency procedures, while I’d launched into a marathon session of Tetris. Neither of us had any idea about the bizarre ‘rapport’ that would develop between us over the next 12 hours.


Welcome to Japan

It all commenced with the first meal trolley, offering a choice of British or Japanese cuisine. To get into the swing of things I followed my neighbour (I’m gonna call him Ken from now on) in going for the Japanese option, a traditional bento box, though when I opened it I had no idea what any of the contents were nor how to tackle them, so chose to observe and follow Ken’s approach from the corner of my eye.

After the first two items were dispatched, Ken gives me a sideways glance after noticing I was duplicating his moves. Busted, I was forced to go it alone with the pretence of knowing exactly what I was doing anyway, however became unstuck almost instantly after cleaning my fingers in the fingerbowl, which moments later turned out to be a clear soup – Ken slurped his down noisily with an air of ridicule. Demoralised, I shut the lid on it early and returned to my Tetris.

The next embarrassing moment occurred a couple of hours later, by when I was quite sozzled and beyond self-guidance. I had stuck on the recent Coen brothers flick ‘Burn After Reading’ and was tickled by a scene halfway through in which (spoiler alert!) Brad Pitt’s character is caught hiding in a bedroom wardrobe owned by George Clooney, who promptly blows Pitt’s brains out with a revolver, splattering the whole wardrobe with gore. What I’d found hilarious was the stupid expression on Pitt’s face just before he’s shot, and rewound it a couple of times to rewatch it. Suddenly I could feel Ken’s stare, and glanced sideways to catch the tail-end of his perplexed expression. Only then did I realise he’d been watching me repeatedly replay a scene of someone getting his head blown off and guffawing to myself. That was the moment I most wished I could speak Japanese, just to explain it was the facial expression I was laughing at, not the murderous act. 


Night had well fallen by then and most passengers were reclined and kipping. Hopefully Ken will as well, I hoped. As a seasoned insomniac I can’t sleep on planes, often finding it difficult in a comfy silent bedroom let alone an upright seat with the roar of jet engines in your ears. So I contentedly resigned myself to a night of retro gaming to keep me alert until touchdown. It soon transpired, however, that I wasn’t the only one who can’t sleep on planes. In fact, Ken was the only other passenger on the entire plane who remained awake with me through the night, which I confirmed during periodic strolls around the gangways to relieve cramp.

It was a surreal situation to be in, with the plane’s entire interior in still darkness except me and Ken’s corner illuminated by our screens and the overhead bulbs. What was cool was that as long as we were awake the same stewardess kept returning to offer drinks, which we both accepted every time. I love the way flight literature warns you to avoid alcohol on flights to prevent dehydration, then sometimes you're plied with as much as you can drink. It was like feeding two dogs – keep offering them biscuits and they’ll keep eating them, full or not. It was also like some kind of private battle, with Ken determined to outdo me in both drinking and sleep deprivation, a game he could never win… 

By the time the rising sun shafted natural light onto us I noted we were both looking quite pale and frazzled, yet as the rest of the plane began to stir to prepare for landing, we remained fixated on our screens, silently thumb-bashing, ‘in the zone’. Ken had been playing shoot-em-ups all night, while I’d been working through old-school classics like Pong and Arkanoid. And then, without warning, and only a few minutes before landing, Ken collapsed on me! In one abrupt movement his joypad dropped to the floor as his head fell sideways onto my shoulder, then his upper body followed, forcing me to grab him with both arms before he crumpled into my lap – it took a couple of firm shakes before he roused and realised what had happened.

“Awwwww yakkatokko yakkatokko!” he apologised earnestly, the first words he’d spoken to me (that’s what it sounded like anyway), doing the bowing and praying-hands thing before brushing some imaginary dust off my shoulder. Then he retrieved his fallen joypad and returned to his game screen, but now looking painfully troubled as if he’d just brought the gravest dishonour onto himself and his entire family, leaving me to muse over exactly what troubled him the most. Was it the fact that after such a length of time his consciousness had chosen now to give up the ghost, with his homeland in sight, and had thus lost this battle of endurance with the Westerner? I recalled from those old Clive James TV shows how much the Japanese love their tests of endurance, and had read how retaining honour and ‘face’ was of great importance. 

Or maybe he was just about to defeat the very last boss on his epic space invaders marathon when his brain had finally shut down and scuppered his efforts at the final hurdle. Whatever it was, he had taken it badly, and when we finally disembarked I saw him ahead of me on the gangway solemnly shaking his head as he stepped off the plane.

And so began my visit to Japan, where the surreality of the flight was to segue into an even more surreal day and week in Tokyo.