Day 15 - アメリカヘ帰ります - Returning to America

Day 15 - アメリカヘ帰ります - Returning to America

Day 15 was only a partial day in Japan.  I had a flight to catch early in the afternoon.  We gave some thought to fitting in one last thing into our visit before checking in for the flight.  In the end we decided to head straight to Haneda and hang out there for a few hours before returning home.  Haneda is very well designed, with a departure area that is more like a high-end shopping district than an airport.  It would be a good place to wait before boarding the flight.  

After breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant, we finished packing, checked out, and had them call a taxi for the airport.  

The view of the front of the Skyfront Hotel.  Not quite as picturesque as the Tamagawa river.

A habit of mine while in Japan is to take pictures of signage.  I do it as a form of language practice.  If I spot a sign where I recognize the kanji in it but can’t quite read it all, I’ll take a picture and spend time translating it later.  

“Consider Earth’s environment, this company is generating electricity from the sun’s light!”  The rest is about how their solar panels can help reduce the amount of CO2 in the environment.  

This poster caught my eye as we were entering the security area.  Most of the time in government posters, they’ll use an attractive female agent in uniform, with a big, beautiful smile, to encourage the person reading the poster to action.  The stern expression on this woman’s face caught my attention because it was very different from the posters I’d seen before.  

“Hey you, if you smuggle your life is OVER!”  

When I read the big announcement on the poster, my sense that this was a different sort of poster increased.  Instead of a polite, friendly invitation to doing something, it was written in a very stern, almost rude form of speech.  A Japanese member of my language exchange group told me that it was written in kansai-ben, the dialect of the western region of Japan, around Osaka and Kyoto.  She told me it was the tone of a stern mother speaking down to a child.  She offered the opinion that it was written this way to catch the readers’ attention, to startle them into reading and remembering it.  

  

“The smuggling of illicit drugs is a serious crime,” the poster goes on to say, returning to more standard Japanese.  “Cases where people rationalize accepting invitations to take on luggage with stimulant drugs and smuggle them are increasing.”  The hardest phrase in this sentence was “甘い気持ち,” which literally translates to “sweet feeling.”  My friend in my language exchange group said it refers to someone who is giving themselves reasons to do something that they know inside they shouldn’t do.  I picked “rationalize” as the best term to use.  

I’ve taken lots of pictures at Haneda before, so I didn’t feel the need to take many this time.  This sign on one of the bathrooms caught my attention.  If I’m reading it correctly, the bathroom it was attached to was handicap friendly, had first aid equipment, could be used to change a baby’s diaper, could be used to give birth, and had a secret passage that could be used for escape when the zombie apocalypse occurred.  

Yeah…  It pretty much seemed to be all that.  I think the hatch to the zombie escape route is there in the middle of the picture.  

That was pretty much it.  We waited for our flight.  When it was time to board, they had a different line for each group, which seemed to be a more efficient way of doing it.  

This was my fifth trip to Japan.  As with my previous trips, I enjoyed my time here.  Except for the disappointment of not achieving my baseball stadium goal, and being sick for almost all of the trip, it mostly went as planned.  There were one or two unusually experiences I had interacting with people that I’ll write about later.  But most of my interactions with the people I met there went well.  

My last picture of the trip was of the bento box lunch I bought at a tempura restaurant at Haneda.  It’s on the second floor, to the left of the big escalator, under the edge of the bridge there.  I recommend you try it if you find yourself there.