One last day in Tokyo

Departing Singapore, I must pass through Narita once more to get home. Unfortunately, I learn that my flight back to the States has been involuntarily rescheduled - by twenty-four hours. Truthfully, there are far worse things in life than an extra day in Japan. However, my involuntary delay does not promise a trip to Tokyo, only to an airport-vicinity hotel and to a couple meal vouchers. This mobile "waiting room" - travellators from the arrival gate, queuing in the immigration line, the pleasantly cursory customs inspection, several escalators to the departure area, the snaking line at the ticketing agent, the wait at the shuttle bus area, the ride to the hotel, the wait at the hotel check-in counter, the elevator ride up to my floor - can hardly count as a visit to Japan. However, the truth is that omnitopia almost inevitably blurs and bleeds into the local culture. As such, its surrounding membrane of non-place may be termed permeable. My hotel meal, for example, is not the kind of fast food fare one would find in an airport. Rather, I am treated to a Western style steak dinner.

Writing this, I realize that I've entered the bus, found my seat, and begun happily clicking away at my keyboard, this time without staring out the rain drizzled windows that greeted me on my first arrival a week ago. That night I was plainly and unapologetically awestruck at the tiny differences that met me. The lushly terraced greenery that lines the highway, the elegant and complex script of the Japanese language, even the shape of the man on the pedestrian walkway sign (a fascinating distinction between every country I've visited) demanded my rapt appraisal. But now in this brief stopover before my return to the States, I practice the somewhat more jaded look of the flâneur, the one who knows [here's an article where I flesh this notion out]. This is an act, naturally, a tourist put-on. I have not seen Tokyo, Hong Kong, or Singapore. I have simply played around the edges of their omnitopian nodes. I don't feel guilty; I never planned for anything more. But I do feel a need to return and try again, to stay longer, and to experience these places as more than fleeting moments.