Travels!!!

June 10, 2009, 12:53AM EST, 1:53PM Tokyo, 38000 ft over Sea of Okhotsk

I’m in the air now, in a little aluminum peapod with wings, following the never-ending sunlight. We keep the windows closed in a last-ditch attempt at diurnality, but through the cracks the light waits like a patient visitor from a collections agency; one cannot hoard the nighttime forever.
With the small side lamp that looks like a cross between a church cupola and a bowler hat, I am filling out the many forms that will eventually allow me to enter Japan. I am tickled to find that that my knowledge of bureaucratic Japanese has improved; I can recognize many more of the gruff, no nonsense, ideographic nouns. Phrases like “For use by foreigner” (外国人用) have never — and perhaps never will again, once the novelty wears off — looked more appealing.
There’s a new form that I did not see last year; a quarantine questionnaire mandated after the appearance of the swine flu. From the looks of it, it was hastily put together. The English is choppy, and it isn’t on any sort of government card; rather, it looks like it was faxed by the Ministry of Health to airlines and copied wholesale thereafter. The text is crooked on the page.
My first instinct is to have a good self-righteous balk at the seemingly shoddy form, but then I imagine what it must have been like the day after news broke that a new, quite terrifyingly virulent disease had popped up. Some office full of poor schlubs at the MoH would have had to set up a whole new procedure for dealing with those of us who were either stupid enough or desperate enough to travel to Japan with a fever. Some even poorer schlub among them had to translate this form, as I doubt the government would have invested the extra coin or time in pretty wording when a muscular grunt would do. They probably didn’t sleep for a couple of nights. It seems to have staved off the worst. If I had come to Japan a month ago, I would have had to call a health office every day for a week with my temperature. Now I just have to fill out a form on crooked paper. Kudos, Japan.