W a y m a r k s ~: Hotel Quarantine

'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 28^th 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.