Cherubic Little Flutter

OK.  So we have about thirty minutes till landing.  Bad time to begin an entry.  I was bounced up to biz on this flight.  This is always a boon.  But that I’m on an ANA flight bound for Haneda, rather than on an Air China flight, makes adjustment that much more favorable.  Outside it’s foggy.  That’s OK.  Japanese fog has a nice air about it.  Up in my ears the eternally distinct Eric Dolphy whose beautiful name is only surpassed buy his sui generis smooth, goose honk. 

How many times is this now?  65?  75?  I actually used to know the count.  My old passport had so many big stickers showing entry to Japan, it was a quick trot through and an addition or two for what happened before and it was clear.  It doesn’t matter.  This is something I’ve done many, many times.   And characteristically, reliably, there is cherubic little flutter, every time you walk out into this country.  It is a wonderful place to visit. 

Now, is it a place to live?  I won’t be moving here any time soon with my family.  But it is clearly an upgrade in civic sophistication.  Beijing has been a work in progress since 1906 or so.  There is no end in site.  We have our JingJinBei megalopolis to work towards. You can marvel at the ripping edge of time-lapse-photography, amid the cranes and drilling and dust.  It will be sometime after I have passed that this city finally has a chance to exhale and buff and polish all that it’s constructed.  Meanwhile, Tokyo’s upkeep has more to do with pruning than blunt plastic surgery for some time now. 

There is a copy of “Time Out Tokyo” that I snatched as part of my business class goodies.  Flipping through, you can pretend to be a local and consider what it would be like to have sophisticated opinions about why Waggu beef tastes the way it does and where it is you can sample the best of the best.  It’s a young person’s game for sure, until it becomes a nesters game, perhaps.  Can see some compromised version of that antique train, barreling round the mountain?

Down below, off to the right, is Tokyo.  The city that does not really love its waterfront very much. No. You wouldn’t either if you lived with a few millennium’s worth of tsunamis.  That cherubic flutter is starting.  I’m getting ready to bow and dust off my limited vocabulary and consider this fractured gem from the Confucian mirror of civilized order.

The sun is bright through the fog.