Arriving in Covid Japan
Returning to a Country in the Grip of the Pandemic
I lead a double life. It’s what I’ve always wanted. When I was a child my ambition was to become a spy. I even visited the careers counselor in my school for advice on how I could realize this dream.
But, after all, my life involves no espionage. It is only ‘double’ in the sense that, post-retirement, I spend part of each year in Japan and part in England.
Covid complicates matters. After living and working in Japan for 36 years, I flew to London in late March 2020, shortly after retiring from my university position and only three days after the first lockdown was imposed in the UK.
I returned to Japan the following December to spend two months with my Japanese husband and to see family and friends.
‘You must stay in the hotel for three days,’ a masked woman at Kansai Airport informed me. ‘You can’t leave your room at all.’
My heart sank. It seemed an eternity. I was keen to return to the beautiful rustic wooden house my husband had designed and helped build thirty years before. Surrounded by a large luxuriant garden and located on the outskirts of Takamatsu, it is a kind of paradise for me.
But it seemed a case of paradise lost. Covid took precedence. It meant that not only did my personal wishes need to be deferred but also that Japan had become a strange place. It was like an enormous muffling sheet had been thrown over the whole country. I was used to the occasional individual wearing a mask, but now everyone had the lower half of their face hidden.
Of course, I had come up against Covid measures already. I had just spent eight months in the UK, where lockdowns closed the churches and restaurants and pubs, most of the shops, and even the schools. Still, few British people wore masks outdoors and, with the spring and summer of 2020 fortuitously fine and warm, outdoors was where many of us spent much of our time.
On landing in Osaka that December of 2020, I found Kansai Airport quite changed, and for the worse. I recalled a lively, bustling place with long queues at the check-in counters and the arrivals hall crowded with well-dressed Japanese trailing smart wheeled suitcases in their wake, scurrying purposefully to their destinations.
I remembered how, when setting off on an international flight, I regarded Kansai Airport as a convenient place where I could find perfect gifts for friends and family in the wide variety of shops housed on the floor between departures and arrivals. I would also stock up on tissues and cough drops at one of the pharmacies and visit a dark little restaurant that served particularly good udon noodles and tempura.
Arriving at the airport nearly a year after the first reports were circulated globally of a mysterious virus detected in Wuhan in China, I felt myself in a ‘ghost airport’.
Kansai was a shadow of its former self. A deathly quiet reigned. All the shops and restaurants were closed. Everyone — passengers and airport staff — was masked, subdued.
The arrivals area was marked out with roped walkways and signs. The connecting flight from Dubai had been only a fifth full, and my fellow passengers and I processed along the designated route in silence, straggling down a brightly lit corridor that seemed to go on forever. Officials waved us on, using extravagant gestures and saying not a word.
At the first station on the route saliva tests were administered. Each of us was given a plastic tube into which we need to spit. We were beckoned into tiny cubicles to fill our containers up to a designated mark. Despite all my efforts, I was unable to comply.
My mouth remained stubbornly dry even though pictures of lemons and sour lozenges were hung on the walls of the cubicle, intended to stimulate salivary glands.
I had taken a decongestant tablet several hours into the flight from Dubai for aching, blocked sinuses. A nurse, noticing my predicament, frowned, and ushered me into a small office where she put a long swab up both nostrils and swabbed vigorously.
Tears rolled down my cheeks. But I clenched my fists, determined not to cry out or pull away. I had been away from the country for eight months, but I had not forgotten the Japanese belief in the value of enduring pain with patience and dignity: Gaman shinasai.
Once this painful procedure was over, I was at liberty to rejoin my fellow passengers. I joined a queue, again walking down starkly lit long corridors.
We marched forward, periodically motioned to come to a halt by an official posted before a station of desks manned by masked young people in uniforms. We shuffled our feet, clutched our documents to our chest and once invited to sit, pulled out the required papers for scrutiny.
I needed to show the negative result from the PCR test I’d had taken at Boots in Lancaster and a paper printed with a QR code indicating I had completed an official online questionnaire for the Japanese government authorities.
I’d also printed out and signed a pledge accessed on the official website indicating I promised to obey any quarantine restrictions imposed. My passport was asked for again and again, the officials holding it up to the light and examining it carefully.
If we didn’t already have it, we needed to install an app on our phones that would enable Japanese officialdom to notify us and ascertain our physical location at all times.
At a certain point we were given lanyards with colored ribbons to hang around our necks. The color indicated the length of time we each needed to spend in quarantine at whatever hotel we’d been assigned to.
When the woman at the final station told me my quarantine time was three days, she wore that look of kind but implacable conviction I knew well from my long years of residence in Japan. It signified there was no point in protesting.
I was given a number and directed to a waiting area where I found ten or so other passengers I recognized from my flight. We sat silently, staring ahead or nervously punching away at mobile phones.
We had been told that when our number was called, it meant the PCR test we had taken had had a negative result and that we finally would be free to make our way to immigration, collect our luggage, and be taken outside to the bus that would convey us to our quarantine hotel.
Now, identified as a number, I felt like a number, the compulsory mask contributing to the sense of my identity slowly slipping away. I was becoming a stranger to myself, just as Japan had become strange to me.
I felt a pang for the ‘old’ Japan I had known. As we had made our descent, approaching the airport, I had glimpsed the country I remembered and loved with its stunning scenery of steep forested mountains with quaint tiny villages in their valleys, the glittering blue lakes and rivers and the sea that was never more than a few hours’ drive away.
It had been a long day. Slumping down in my seat, I felt suddenly overwhelmed by tiredness. It was already more than twenty-four hours since I had left my house in Lancaster in the northwest corner of England to begin my journey.
The mask made breathing difficult. I longed to tear it off and stamp on it.
I sat in the waiting area of the airport for nearly an hour, joined by more and more passengers from the Dubai flight. Then an official with a clipboard appeared and began calling out numbers.
I was dismayed. One by one, everyone around me rose, smiling with relief as their number had been called. They disappeared down another long corridor.
Finally, I was the only one left. The official — a plump woman who seemed kind– who’d been calling out the numbers smiled apologetically at me and walked off.
Another hour went by as I sat, feeling increasingly worried, in a completely deserted airport waiting room. Finally, a man in a black suit with a badge and the plump woman appeared. They conferred, and then she approached to inform me that the result of the nasal swab I had had was inconclusive.
The news made me feel too anxious to sit any longer. I began pacing up and down. I soon settled on a routine. I would walk towards the darkened windows with their view of streetlamps shining on asphalt. I’d gaze out for a minute or two and walk back to the area of the room where I’d left my backpack and coat on a chair.
Then I would do the whole thing, making a circuit of about thirty meters, over again. And again.
After half an hour of pacing up and down in that waiting room at Kansai Airport — anxiously awaiting my result, wondering if I might even end up being sent back to the UK — I was suddenly visited by a wave of homesickness so intense I felt dizzy.
I thought of my husband and the one of our three sons still resident in Japan, of our darling cat, of my dear friends, of the safe and comfortable and pleasant life I had enjoyed in Takamatsu for so many years.
I got tearful when the black-suited official with a badge finally appeared to tell me my test was negative. What a relief! I was finally free to do what was — pre-Covid — the ordinary procedure for any passenger exiting an international flight at a Japanese airport: to go to passport control and then proceed to the baggage claim area.
Once I had collected my suitcase, I joined a group of other travelers waiting in the deserted airport lobby to be escorted to a hotel shuttle bus.
As we pulled up before a huge brightly lit building, I felt another surge of relief. I was to spend my quarantine period at the Nikko, a four-star hotel within the airport precincts.
I’d heard of other travelers, not so fortunate, being bused to private hotels within Osaka and forced to spend their confinement in tiny rooms.
It was all as I’d expected. My room was spacious and comfortable, even rather luxurious, with a huge bathroom filled with toiletries. Shortly after I’d walked in, there was a knock at the door followed by the sound of a muffled voice telling me that my evening bento had been left on a chair outside my door.
I peeked out to see a masked guard wearing a hat and uniform sitting on a chair in the corridor. He waved a hand in greeting and bowed. I bowed my head, collected the plastic bag holding my bento along with a bottle of green tea, and retreated into my room.
Untying the ribbon, unwrapping the paper, and lifting the lid of the bento box, I found a typically exquisite Japanese boxed meal.
There was a large portion of rice accompanied by slices of teriyaki chicken. There was a salad, cooked vegetables, pickles, and even a small cup containing a spoonful of miso and some dried mushrooms and seaweed requiring only the addition of hot water to become soup.
Tadaima! I’m home, I thought. My heart was filled with gratitude. Japan had become a dystopian version of itself, but the kindness of the people and the excellence of its services and the deliciousness of its beautifully presented cuisine remained unchanged.
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