'Welcome to the Hotel Quarantine' - A Pilgrimage during a Pandemic |
Life under “Lockdown” – A
London to Tokyo, via Yokohama Diary #8
A global pandemic is not the most
ideal time to emigrate. But life goes on. By increments we are all, hopefully,
progressing inch by inch closer to a new normality. After the last year and a
half, I couldn’t imagine life becoming any more dystopian. Surreal memories of finding
myself to be the only pedestrian walking through a deserted Canary Wharf, the heart
of London’s financial district eerily devoid of traffic, in the middle of the
day in the middle of the working week was weird enough, invoking recollections
of disaster movies, such as 28 Days Later and I am Legend.
Checking in for an international
flight, just a few weeks ago, in a near empty Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow Airport
comes perhaps a close second. Everyone, at all points of the process, strangely
anonymised, wearing face masks. Everyone ritually disinfecting hands as they
pass by a succession of sentinel hand-sanitizer posts, as though genuflecting
at the Stations of the Cross, embarking on some bizarre Sci-Fi-like modern
pilgrimage – perhaps fleeing from (or towards?) Armageddon. Normal questions
about hazardous articles in luggage now taking second place to questions about
the state of your health and requests to see the sheafs of certification concerning
Covid-19 tests and other medical declarations, as required by the Governments
at your intended destination.
The weeks leading up to my
departure were a recurring nightmare of fears: fears that I might have
overlooked a crucial piece of necessary bureaucracy; fears that I might not get
the certificate attesting to my double-jabbed vaccination status in time; fears
that I might not make it to my “72 hours prior to travel” Covid-19 test because,
of all the weekends on which I’d chosen to fly – inevitably – this one was
one of those weirdly normalised London weekends when the entire Piccadilly Line
was closed for never-ending engineering works; fears that I might get a
positive test result, thus voiding all my plans and intentions entirely, not to
mention the vast expenditure of it all. By comparison, the formalities of
actually getting a visa and the attendant documentation required for the
granting of resident status in Japan when the Embassy finally reopened back in
May seemed a doddle. Hence, the moment I placed my boarding pass on the scanner
and the security gates magically parted seemed unreal in the extreme.
Stopover in Anchorage, Alaska - 2004 |
Fortunately for me, my previous
career, having spent the last 20+ years ferrying international touring
exhibitions around the world for the British Museum, was ample preparation for
all of this oddness. I’ve spent a large proportion of my time navigating my way
through unusual situations in airports across four different continents. I’ve
also spent many hours waiting in such places, having wrangled with many
different visa systems and the associated processes which enable an air
traveller to get from A to B with the correct permissions, stamps, finger
prints, facial scans, metal detector checks, airway bills, customs paperwork, and
the like. The key to the whole scenario is to keep a nimble eye on what is
happening and being prepared to act quickly at the required moment should
anything appear to be in danger of going awry; that, along with a hefty portion
of patience, knowing that more often than not these long-haul journeys will inevitably
be punctuated by interminable stretches of waiting, the long hours in which you
are powerlessly held in thrall to the system which you are simply passing
through.
Sitting in the Departures Hall, I
couldn’t help reflecting on many of the strangest journeys I’ve made, such as:
circumnavigating the globe from London to Tokyo to London, via Anchorage
Alaska; or, crossing the equator for the first time after a 24-hour stopover in
Hong Kong on the eve of the first umbrella protest. I’ve done some decidedly
long journeys too. I once flew from London to Beijing, where I stayed less than
24 hours, before flying back to London, only to fly from London to Seoul just a
day or two later. But I think my longest single journey was flying from Tokyo
to Mexico City, via Krasnoyarsk, Frankfurt, and Chicago (a strange scenario
which means I have entry stamps in my passport for both Chicago and Mexico City
issued on the same day).
En Route : LHR >> HKG >> SYD >> MEL - 2014 |
Flying over the Ukraine in a cargo
plane the day before flight MH17 was blown from the sky was a sobering
experience (TV News reports the following day, speculating that it had “probably
been a mistake shooting down an airliner” and that “they were more likely
aiming to shoot down a cargo plane instead”, seemed to overlook the crucial fact
that cargo planes have people on board too!). I was once on a flight which was
struck by lightning as we were crossing the English Channel. I saw a white
flash swiftly pass through the cabin like an ethereal ghost hurrying to the
rear of the plane (I did briefly wonder at the time, if, like the Highlander,
this might have made me immortal?).
On several cargo flights I was
lucky enough to sit in the cockpit with the pilots during take-off and landings
in different airports, such as: Mexico City, Chicago, Krasnoyarsk, and Taipei.
One of the best was Hong Kong. Watching as we weaved between clumps of clouds
which were flickering with summer lightning like incandescent candyfloss. With
Victoria Harbour passing by so close below, it felt like if I reached out I’d
be able to touch the tall buildings, all of them lit up brightly, sparkling in
the dark warmth of the night.
Loading Cargo at Incheon, South Korea, 2011 |
I’ve also spent many an hour sitting in airports as they have slowly emptied of passengers with all the shops closing down for the night. It’s quite an eerie and sometimes unnerving experience. You hope that your contacts won’t forget you, or that when the time comes you won’t miss meeting your aircrew. There was one occasion in Luxembourg when we met a pilot and his co-pilot, who were both happy to find they’d have some company on their flight. It was only after we’d been chatting for about ten minutes that we discovered they and we were flying to different destinations entirely – thus we very narrowly avoided following the wrong aircrew onto the wrong flight! – If this had happened, once on-board, I’m sure the aircrew would have checked their paperwork more closely and realised we weren’t meant to fly with them before we got underway; but the delay this unintended misdirection would have caused would probably have meant we’d have missed our intended flight because the aircrews of cargo planes don’t tend to hang around for late running passengers – as I found out once, just in the nick of time, when clambering up the ladder to board a cargo plane which was just about to close its door and get underway!
In some ways though, it’s a real
joy to pass through a near empty airport. The place feels less fraught. There’s
less of that nervous jockeying to get a spot on the shuttle train between the
terminals. Less stressing over squeezing into the lifts crammed with unwieldy
baggage trolleys. There’s more time to step back and assess, to realise that
you are heading in the right (or wrong!) direction. And the queues for
the loos are mercifully shorter or non-existent. The shop staff in the Duty
Free shops, if they are still open, look decidedly bored. My flight to Japan had
been delayed by four hours which meant we were either the last or last-but-one passenger
flight to depart Heathrow T5 that night. The passengers on my plane were all
well-spaced out across the rows of seating, as 'socially distanced' as the
cramped Economy Class cabin would permit. First and Business Class were both
almost entirely empty. Everyone wore face masks throughout the duration of the
flight, only taking them off briefly to eat.
I’d read about the exacting processes
to be expected on arrival in Japan, and this information turned out to be
accurate. It was a long gauntlet which needed to be run as each part of every
traveller’s paperwork was checked thoroughly and then double-checked again at
desk after desk. Unlike at Heathrow where the Covid-19 test was a nasal swab
which made my eyes water involuntarily, here at Haneda we had to spit into a test
tube – a process which feels a lot less invasive and a lot less uncomfortable,
but each passenger was ushered into a small booth in which to spit more
discreetly. The tedious paperwork processes actually alleviated some of the
long wait for this test to be processed, but there were still long interminable
stretches of waiting too. On the whole the few children who were travelling
with their parents were remarkably well behaved; only a few whined quietly at
their parent’s elbows due to a very forgivable combination of boredom and extreme
tiredness.
Once our test results were returned
(happily mine was still negative) we were led through to Immigration, which
rather comfortingly was dealt with far more informally than usual. Stewards remained
close at hand throughout to direct us travellers at all points with friendly
deferential but decisively firm instructions, marching us back and forth along
a beguiling maze of ribbon-barriered corridors. Once all my paperwork was at
last in order and with my residence permit now reassuringly in hand, I passed
through the last of all these checks where a Customs officer looked at my
passport and then, returning it, looked up over his facemask and said warmly
“Okaeri nasai” (Welcome home) instead of the usual “Yokoso Nihon” (Welcome to
Japan).
But I wasn’t home just yet. My
fellow passengers and I were then marshalled down to a bus, where we were in
for another long wait. Eventually though, the bus moved off into the night.
Winding through the near empty streets it took us to a hotel in Yokohama. Again,
here in the lobby, another long process of form filling ensued and instructions
were relayed and affirmed. Once again, the staff were faultlessly polite and
friendly throughout. I was issued with a thermometer and a boxed meal. I was
then led to my room on the 28th floor, where at 3am – a full seven
hours after landing, and almost 24 hours total in transit – I was able to
collapse into bed with no further obligations until I awoke later that morning.
For the next 6 days I was required
to live in this small hotel room like a monk in his cell. Isolated, no going
out whatsoever. A meal box (Obento) delivered three times a day: for
breakfast, lunch and dinner. With a bottle of water each time (no alcohol was
allowed). My daily rituals required taking and reporting my body temperature to
reception each morning, and answering the random spot checks on my location demanded
by the Japan Government’s panopticon-like mobile phone App, which also wanted
to know how I was feeling each day. My own phone was too old to support the App,
so I had to rent a rather expensive one expressly for this purpose from the
Government, to be returned on the first day of my eventual release from
quarantine. I didn’t regret the expense too much though, because the staff very
helpfully set the whole thing up for me (which, watching them, I feared would
have been well beyond my Luddite-like capabilities had it been left solely up
to me), and also because, unlike for anyone arriving in the UK, here in Japan
the cost of bed and board in the quarantine hotel was borne entirely by the
Japanese Government (Arigatou, Nihon).
Akarenga Soko & the Hikawa Maru, Yokohama |
The hotel was much more comfortable
than I had been expecting. Plus, opening the curtains when I woke up later that
morning, I found I had a wonderful view of the seafront at Yokohama,
overlooking the landmarks of Akarenga Sōko, the red brick
warehouses built by Western traders in the nineteenth century, plus the old NYK
Hikawa maru ocean liner. I’d walked along that promenade many times
before with friends and family, but for now all I could do was watch it from my
solitary confinement in my hermetically sealed room. I had six days to seek
spiritual satori, and to sleep off my jetlag. Keeping myself busy with
my PhD studies, messaging my family and friends, meditating upon the transience
of the boats coming and going from my window’s high vantage.
NYK Hikawa Maru - Yokohama |
I joked via social media with my
former colleagues at the BM who asked how I was coping with life under
quarantine, saying that all of my life for the last twenty years – spending
most of my time living for long periods in hotels – was the perfect preparation
for this. It was in fact my moment. As if, all my life, I’d been in
training for exactly this – as though this was my own personal
Olympics. A lot of people had asked me before I left the UK if I might get to
see any of the Tokyo 2020 Games when I reached Japan, and I’d replied: ‘probably
not.’ But from my hotel window I could see one of the venues, Yokohama Baseball
Stadium, lit up at night with a sprinkling of spectators in the stands. At Haneda
Airport too, I’d seen the Cuban and Moroccan Olympic teams arriving. The TV was
wall-to-wall with seemingly non-stop coverage, exclusively focussed on the team
of the host nation. There was absolutely no escaping the Olympic Games, just as
I’d experienced previously in Britain in 2012, and in China in 2008.
Yokohama Baseball Stadium - 'Tokyo 2020' Olympic Games |
The monotony of life in my hotel
room wasn’t too bad though. After the prolonged periods of living alone through
the last two ‘lockdowns’ in London, long periods of solitary study were now a
routine normality for me. Reading books and articles, updating my bibliography,
or watching history documentaries (such as my perennial favourite, John Romer’s
Testament) helped to pass the time. The view from the window was an unexpected
pleasure too. I’d assumed I’d end up with some non-descript view of an office
block wall or something similarly dull, but watching the maritime activity in
the harbour as well as the sunrise each morning was wonderfully relaxing.
Outside it was clearly baking hot during the daytime. The air con system kept
me from roasting when my room caught the full blaze of the midday sun. But, by
day five I was getting a little desperate for some fresh air and the
opportunity to stretch my legs properly. The thing that surprised me the most
though was the bento box meals – no two of them were ever the same! – They
were delivered three times a day. And there was never any choice. You ate
whatever you were given, and, even though I was asked what allergies I had on
arrival, I was simply told not to eat those things if they appeared in
the boxed meals(!).
Breakfast 'Obento' |
Covid-19 tests were taken early in
the morning on days three and six; once again, mercifully, they were the
spitting into a test tube kind, the same as at the airport. ‘Holiday camp’-like
tannoy announcements reminded you each meal time to wear your facemask and to
be careful not to lock yourself out of your room when you opened your door to
take in your bento box which had been hung silently on your door knob.
It was an odd way too live, strangely Sci-Fi in many respects – but I still
can’t decide if it was more like something out of the imagination of J. G.
Ballard, Philip K. Dick, or Stanley Kubrick. It was a kind of ‘Silent Runnings’
meets ‘The Andromeda Strain’, I suppose – with visits on test days from a group
of medical personnel swathed head to toe in anonymising PPE.
The result of my final test came
via the hotel telephone just after lunch. I was still negative. I’d already
readied my luggage in optimistic anticipation of this moment, and so I was out
of the room an instant later, riding the lift down to the lobby. Handing back
my thermometer, my luggage was stowed under the bus as I quickly climbed
aboard. Ten minutes later the bus was rolling rapidly through the streets,
heading back to the airport, crossing the suspension bridge over Yokohama
harbour which I’d spent so much of the last few days wistfully viewing from the
close confines of my tiny room in the quarantine hotel. My family met me at the
airport – the first time I’d seen them in over a year and a half – a happy
reunion full of hugs, grins and happy tears. We then drove home, as I was still
not allowed to use the public transport system. Finally reaching home I still
wasn’t free, I had 8 more days of quarantine ahead of me. Life in ‘lockdown’
once again, but this time on the other side of the globe in a city where the
infection rate was rapidly rising. Mercifully for me, however, there was now more
space for me to move around in, plus a balcony on which I could stand and at
last breathe fresh air once again. And, of course, most important of all, I
could now relax in the long-missed company of my nearest and dearest. Watching
the sunset together behind the beautiful silhouette of sacred Mount Fuji.
Sunrise over Yokohama |
Though I was now home at last, I
was still under surveillance – required to report my state of health each
morning and answer the random spot checks on my current location which either
came in the form of push-notification ‘pings’ or actual phone calls. These
phone calls were either AI operated video calls in which I had to stare into
the camera with my background clearly visible while my phone’s silent mechanical
eye recorded for 30 seconds. I’ve no idea if these visual recordings were
checked by people or computers, but I waved politely cheerful from time-to-time
just in case it was an actual living breathing human being who had to watch back
half a minute’s worth of footage of me staring at them like a bug-eyed goldfish
stuck in a glass bowl. The other kind of phone call came from an actual person,
speaking either in Japanese or English, asking me where I was and if I was
unwell. Nevertheless, these video calls were oddly ‘big brother’-like because I
could see myself, but the screen I was talking to was completely black, so I
could not see the caller. This always reminded me of the scene in both the old
1953 and more recent 2005 film versions of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds
in which the Martian’s cobra-headed mechanical eye snakes around the basement
of the building in search of hiding humans. Mercifully, these calls were always
fairly quick, but it was the uncertainty of when they might call which
became somewhat wearing if not quite so unnerving as a probing alien mechanical
eye. Each day I’d receive several locator pings and an AI recorded phone call,
and usually a human operator phone call as well. This meant the phone needed to
sit by my side at all times during the day, though calls and pings rarely ever
came much before 8:30am, or later than 6pm. Such dystopian surveillance seemed
politely civilised in this respect, but I was very glad to get shot of the
infernal device as soon as I could when the 15 days of quarantine were done.
The thin line of Mount Fuji traced on the haze of the horizon |
On my first day of freedom, proving
the old adage that ‘only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun’, I
went for a stroll on the hottest day of the year so far in Tokyo. “The mercury topped
somewhere around 36°C”, as the over-dubbed TV News channels here like to say.
But it was a real relief to stretch my legs at last. I noticed that everyone
here in Tokyo is wearing their facemasks. This isn’t so unusual. You often see
people on the trains here wearing them throughout the year. It’s long been the
custom in Japan for those with a bit of a sniffle to wear them, mostly out of
politeness more than anything else. So this wasn’t unusual, but what was
different now was the fact that people were wearing them at all times, even
whilst walking down empty streets. An entire metropolis anonymised. And, though
there were still plenty of people out and about, there did seem to be fewer
people commuting – but it would take a keen eye to spot the difference, because
the trains were just as crowded as the pre-pandemic rush hour on the Tube in
London. Tokyo might currently be under ‘a state of emergency’, but on the face
of things, apart from wearing facemasks at all times, life in the city seems to
be going on much as it always has. A less perceptible pandemic than in the UK perhaps?
I thought it only proper that the
first place I visit should be the local Shinto shrine. To say ‘hello’ to the
local Gods. Here though there were subtle indicators that all was not well with
the world. The chōzuya, the place where you should
ritually cleanse your hands and mouth when entering the shrine, was dry and
without its attendant utensils. Instead, stood sentinel beside it was one of
the now ubiquitous hand-sanitizer stands found at every point of entry and exit
in our daily lives. Plus ringing the bell to attract the Gods’ attention when
praying at the shrine was now no longer allowed. One just had to hope that the
ritual three hand claps would suffice to attract their favourable hearing.
While I was there a few other visitors came and went, throwing their coins,
clapping their hands and saying a silent prayer each. I’m sure all of us each
made the same request alongside whatever else we were hoping for divine assistance
with – that request being, of course, an end to this interminable pandemic soon.
The Buddhist Temple next door was
almost entirely deserted. I saw just one other person coming and then going; a
young girl who evidently had gone to pick her younger sister up from the nearby
kindergarten, both of them, hand-in-hand, returning home. It was nice to sit
for a moment under the dappled light shed by the dense canopy of green maple leaves
overhead. But it was really far too hot to linger long. The loud rhythmic noise
of the cicadas rasping, rising fast and falling slow all around me. I couldn’t
help reflecting how the pandemic and the periods of ‘lockdown’ and quarantine I’ve
had to live through over the last year and a half has slowed life down a lot.
Though these times have been punctuated by periods of almost frenetic activity,
attempting to catch up with the world as it continues to turn. Life’s tempo is undoubtedly
all out of kilter, but I hope we learn from these experiences of upheaval and
uncertainty, so that when life does return back to some sort of normality we
can improve upon the way we lived before – so that we can all live in a new world
made fresh once again. A world hopefully with more balance, with the good things
in life shared more equitably, and a greater emphasis on care and calmness.
I hope, too, that sooner rather
than later, I can stop writing these pieces, because I really don’t want to
write any more entries here in this seemingly never-ending ‘lockdown diary’ of
mine. But, such is life, sadly – shikata ga nai, ne.
Also on 'Waymarks'
Behind the Scenes - 25 Years at the British Museum
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments do not appear immediately as they are read & reviewed to prevent spam.