This guy left a laptop in a Tokyo airport for 3 hours… you won’t believe what happened next!
I’m in Tokyo for a month so strap yourselves in for a 50% increase in racism. Or just generalizations that are 50% less based in reality because I can’t understand what anyone is saying here. The less you have to base your generalizations on the more sweeping they can be, so expect an increase in the frequency of my posts. Japan is a goldmine for the traveler (me, definitely) who enjoys making sweeping proclamations about national character based on a handful of days of interaction. For example (tatoeba):
We will call this The Last Samurai equation. Any foreigner wanting to make sweeping generalizations about Japan inevitably ends up with a contrast between the apparent crushing weight of conformity and hentai or kamikaze pilots. Maybe samurai are to blame for the fate of my laptop. It’s very easy to say so when you don’t really know what’s happening or why. So let’s go with that- Samurai are definitely to blame for the fate of my laptop. Hundreds of years ago if you stole someone’s scroll there’s a good chance you’d just be walking down the street with a stolen scroll and a samurai would cut off your head, just like that.
So back to my generalization/story. I arrived in Tokyo on Monday, flying into Haneda airport. I was in a bit of a tizzy because I had forgotten to get roaming on my phone, and had to figure out how to get to the office. Also I’d been up for 26 hours straight watching a movie about the medieval Japanese government torturing Jesuit priests for trying to convert Japanese peasants. It was a very long movie. The sleep deprivation and my inability to connect to the airport wifi had me believing that I was Portuguese Andrew Garfield on a mission to bring Christianity to peasant villages. Unfortunately, I was actually there to help customize defect management software for a Japanese pharmaceutical company.
Eventually I found a spot where I could connect to the wifi, but my phone was dropping in and out. So I took out my laptop to see if it would have better luck. It did, and I figured out which train line I had to take to get to the office. 20 minutes on the Kamaki line, 20 minutes on the JR line and then I’d be in Ebisu at the office. I bought my first Pocari Sweat of the trip to celebrate and was on my way.
The subway was uneventful, everything was well signposted in English and I arrived at the office. I met my colleagues and received the passcode to my apartment. I was shown to my desk and hit by that sinking feeling you get when you realize you lost something. Worse than that, you lost something and you know exactly where you left it. It’s like your soul leaves your body and travels via satellite to where the lost item sits, undefended. In this case my soul travelled back to the arrivals lounge at Haneda airport, where my laptop sat open at a charging station. I’d been gone for two hours by this point.
FUCK.
There was no chance it was going to be there when I got back. I turned pale. There was a lot of stuff on that laptop that I needed. I’d just put a new sticker on it too. Plus it would be very embarrassing to arrive and meet a new group of colleagues and then be immediately laptopless and useless. So I excused myself from the conversation with my colleagues, jumped in a taxi and went back to the airport. The traffic was awful and progress was slow, which meant I had a lot of time to prepare for my future life without a laptop. I arrived back at Haneda Airport, I still had my luggage because I hadn’t had time to go to my apartment yet. And I didn’t want to tell my colleagues that I was returning to the airport to retrieve my laptop.
I ran up the escalator back to the arrivals lounge, and ran through the crowds to the charging station where I had left my laptop. And there it was, sitting exactly where I’d left it. Someone had left a newspaper right next to it.
To generalize about japan in the form of reverse-generalizations about the rest of the world: I have to believe that there’s no other country in the world where you could leave a valuable laptop in a busy public space and it would still be there when you get back. Certainly, not America. Certainly, not San Francisco. You could make the argument that the fact it was an airport, not Japan was the factor that determined the laptop’s safety. Everyone in an airport is a high-powered business man that already has an embarrassment of laptop riches. That sounds plausible, but I reject that theory because it is not samurai-based.
Next Week: Hentai I bought!
