LAX to Haneda
The ten-hour flight across the Pacific had begun, and we were racing down the runway at a speed that continued to get faster and faster. I started to feel more gravity work on me, and pretty soon we were in the air, racing in the direction of the ocean. I could see all of Los Angeles- the skyline was easily within reach, and I’m pretty sure you could see as far as Pasadena, which was wild, considering we weren’t that high in the air yet. As we reached the ocean, we could see individual boats cruising along the California coastline, which looked so small at a plane’s altitude. The dimming issue also stopped as we took off.
“I’ll name that one John,” Casey spotted the boat as we flew over the ocean. We flew right over John and began to head north, going in the direction of Malibu and San Luis Obispo, right back in the direction of California. About ten minutes into the flight, we were back on land, now going through the countryside of California. Our plane climbed further and further in altitude, and each of the mountains got smaller and smaller on the surface until they seemed like nothing more than some tiny lumps on the ground. Over time, we slowly got closer and closer to the ocean again (in the span of an estimated 20 minutes) and we hovered right on the coast. I watched the view go by for minutes. After a short time, I eventually took this picture:
After trailing the shape of the coastline of California for over forty minutes, I had correctly guessed based off the awkward shape of the land that we were now flying over San Francisco bay, which looked very different from a bunch of flashing lights last time I was there during VN2023, where we arrived at around 9 at night. After flying over San Francisco, we took a sharp turn westward, which meant we would be going over the ocean for a while. It was pretty clear that I wouldn’t see land for a bit, especially because tracking our direction, we didn’t appear to be headed in the direction of Alaska. America disappeared behind us, with an endless sea of blue ahead.
Casey and Derek had already been watching movies for the first hour of the flight while I was still watching us fly over California. Derek spend the first few hours watching Five Nights at Freddy’s as well as some Marvel movie that I don’t know anything about, while Casey eventually got to watching Harry Potter and his favorite Young Sheldon. He’d probably watch iCarly, too, if it was an option on the flight. (he’s been watching a lot of that lately) I continued to look at the view outside for a while but it soon became pretty clear that we weren’t going to be seeing anything interesting for a long time. Everyone did their own thing for another 30 minutes or so, but about an hour and a half into the flight, we all took our minds off the screens for a minute to get the first meal of the flight. (I never watched any movies, somehow it was entertaining for me to spend all nine hours of the flight just staring outside the window even though there was nothing to see other than the ocean.)
There were two meal options: Chicken and pasta. I ended up choosing pasta, and the most people in our group did too. Even Casey, who always talks about eating fried chicken all day, chose the pasta this time. It wasn’t bad- we ended up enjoying it. I asked Casey and Derek about their opinions on the meal at the same time, with Derek saying that the meal was “goated” and Casey also having some positive opinions too. Airplane food honestly isn’t that bad most of the time, and I was able to tolerate it. We finished our meal and Casey and Derek continued to watch more movies into the afternoon, while I continued to stare out the window for a few more hours. In San Diego, it was probably only about 2PM by now, but I knew when we reached Japan it would be 10 PM, which would normally be about the time that I would fall asleep. Because of this, I knew that I needed to try and get some sleep before we reached Japan, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the first day. Because of this, I knew I had to try at least a bit to fall asleep during the flight, but this was really difficult because I wasn’t really used to taking naps at this hour. Normally afternoon naps would come at around 4, but I wasn’t eager to wait. It took over an hour to fall asleep, and even then I was only able to sleep for about 45 minutes. It just wasn’t a good time to sleep, but when I woke up, the entire scene on the plane had changed.
Previously, the windows weren’t being dimmed and let all the natural light in, but now they had been dimmed again- many of the lights weren’t on either, and the cabin essentially was locked in a giant blanket of relative darkness, which was crazy because when I brightened my window for a few moments, it was very clear that it was light out- I could easily tell that we were in the day time. Many people had fallen asleep during this simulated night-time, although many people, like Casey, Derek, and Jason, were still watching movies. Our parents, who were awake a bit over the next few hours, tried to convince Casey to put his screen away for a while and just get some sleep, but he was very insistent on looking at his phone and watching movies. The view outside had gotten pretty boring- we were still flying through the Pacific, and there was no major landmass in sight. It was still just ocean in all directions, which was obviously something that would get boring very fast.
I looked outside and challenged myself to survive the last 7 hours or so of the flight without watching any movies. To start, I managed to brighten up the window up a little the point where I could see a little better but didn’t cause any disturbances. I did take this one picture of the view when the window was darkened, which really did simulate night-time: it genuinely looks like it’s 8PM in this picture, but trust me, it was 1PM.
I also managed to figure out how to get Wi-Fi on the plane by using a guide on the entertainment screen that I had seen Casey discover a few hours earlier when we were just taking off. I managed to text and talk with a few friends, who all had their own things going on.
I honestly did briefly watch Harry Potter over Casey’s shoulder for a bit, and made a few more attempts to sleep, but the next several hours passed extremely slow, with a mix of me looking out the window and reading random things I could find on the Internet at the time. I’m surprised I didn’t go insane, because it was almost 5 hours of sitting idle in the darkness, with only occasional bathroom breaks and not much conversation. I did briefly talk to Derek and Casey about where we were in the flight, as every once in a while Derek would ask me how much longer we’d have until we reach Tokyo. I’d tell him that there were still four or five more hours left, and it’d blow his mind. We looked out the window every once in a while just to see if we could find anything interesting, and there was a time that we saw clouds in the distance. We mistook the clouds for land and believed it to be Alaska, but after checking the map and realizing we were over 700 miles away, I had to shut the speculation down.
Our parents somehow were able to get a good amount of sleep during the flight, probably around 4 or 5 hours, which was way more than the kids could manage (I don’t think a single kid slept for more than an hour) but were waking up later on when we were just crossing the International Date Line. There were still 3 hours to go at this point, and we’d seen nothing but blue and gray outside the window for hours. In San Diego, it was starting to turn to night, but nobody was tired just yet.
I continued to look out the window, stare at the map, and go afk for another three hours. The sea of blue three hours later didn’t look any different from what it looked like three hours earlier, but I knew from the map that we were getting closer and closer to Asia.
About nine hours into the flight, with one more hour left, I began to notify Casey and Derek that the flight was almost over, and we’d be seeing the Japanese mainland soon. I knew the rough outline of the Tokyo area, and I knew that as we flew towards Haneda Airport, we’d also see the majority of the Tokyo skyline, which would probably make for a really cool airplane shot. Casey, who had gotten his wish of the window seat and was also very excited, prepared his phone for the landing. We had one more meal (which had a bunch of vegetables that I didn’t finish, although I did willingly eat all the fruit, which there was quite a lot of) and afterwards we had nothing left to do but watch more movies and wait for Japan’s land to approach.
About 30 minutes before the flight, Casey and Derek stopped their movies completely to get the final shot of our landing. The dimming of the lights had finally stopped now, and we all began to look outside the airplane window in excitement for our trip. We were about to see Japan’s landscape, and it would be in mere minutes. The ocean continued to pass, and we had seen nothing but blue for hours. I prepared my phone camera as Casey and Derek continued to scout ahead in anticipation of land. While we flew over the ocean, we mistook clouds on the horizon to be Japanese land several times. There were quite a lot of clouds on the horizon, and after doing some research on the flight I learned that Tokyo was very cloudy that day, which meant we could expect to have our view obscured when we were approaching land.
And then we saw it… the Japanese coast.
Our plane continued to get closer and closer, and in excitement, we all rushed to check the map and verify that it wasn’t the illusion of a cloud playing tricks on us again. Once we verified, we were really happy. Unfortunately, the land was obscured by a bunch of clouds, and we were only a few miles away from the land when our plane suddenly flew right over the clouds, obscuring the view from us once again.
But we knew it wasn’t the end, because any second now we would fly through the cloud and the landscape would be revealed below us. Sure enough, we began to descend into the clouds, and we could see nothing but white outside our windows. It took a really long time to get through the cloud, and for a while we saw nothing but white on all angles, like we were trapped in some strange universe that had no form, just gas. I decided to play my record button, and mere seconds after I started to record, the plane descended below the cloud, revealing the Japanese landscape below.
The place looked nothing like America- the first thing I noticed was that the grass looked very green. Of course, everyone knows that grass is green (unless you’ve never touched grass), but in Japan it was far different – you could clearly notice the difference with America- American grass is so dead and boring: in Japan it actually comes to life. The whole place was full of crop fields, small white houses scattered around the area. For the next five or so minutes, we continued to look outside, passing a small river near Tokyo as the buildings became more and more substantial and the place turned from rural to crowded. We were approaching, once again, the biggest metropolis in the world. Words cannot describe the size of this place- it’s almost the population of California living here and it doesn’t end there. We flew over district after district, heading towards Tokyo Bay.
And I severely underestimated the sheer scale of this place- they don’t call this one of the biggest cities in the world for no reason at all. It’s genuinely massive, and we flew for eight minutes through the endless carpet of white buildings. It was all recorded by me and Casey, who each made our own recording as we flew through the grand city. My video was about to reach the 9 minute mark in terms of length when we reached Tokyo Bay. I could barely see the other side of the bay- you could probably drive for two hours and not even get across the city.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out that we would be flying for at least another ten minutes. Data storage wasn’t an issue- I haven’t removed any pictures from VN2023 or JP2024 after this trip and I still have more than 40 Gigs of storage space ( I barely use space outside of my videos/pictures) but I didn’t want the video to be too long, because it’d be hard to navigate through everything. I didn’t record again until the plane began to turn at point blank range in the direction of Haneda Airport, which was right across the bay. It took the plane almost 7 minutes to cross the bay, which just goes to show how wildly huge this place is.
We were very close to Haneda Airport and I was on recording #2, having been recording for nearly 6 minutes. Casey was also recording, but after using his phone so much on the plane and having recorded the last 20 minutes before the landing, Casey’s phone was at 1%.
Literally less than a minute before we landed:
Me: *admiring the view* Okay, the buildings are slightly underwhelming from afar. This is the final approach, guys! Ten hours of buildup for this! Casey, are you recording?
Derek: We’re so close!
Casey: My phone is literally on life support right now, bro… I’m on 1% battery.
Me: *laughs* Wow, imagine your battery dies right before we land.
*we’re 20 feet from the runway *
Casey: OH MY- Of course, it died!
*our plane landed like 15 seconds later*
Oof.
First Day in Tokyo
It took a while to shake off the laughter and disappointment of Casey’s phone running out of battery, but there was far more ahead now that we were finally in Japan. It seemed so unreal to simply pull out google maps, check the satellite, and see that we were now in Asia. It was simply a dot moving from one side of the globe to another, but it seemed to hold so much gravity for some reason. We don’t travel overseas very much. Besides JP2024 and VN2023, I’ve only traveled overseas one other time in my whole life.
It took around an hour or so to get out of the airport. We had to go through immigration first, which took a short time and after getting that stamp on my passport, we went to claim our luggage. This was evidently pretty boring, but once we finally reached the front of the airport, we could finally start to see Japan proper, more than what the airport could offer. We had to linger in the front of the airport a little while longer to find our driver (who spoke Vietnamese, so no communication problems here) who we’d talked with ahead of time. I’m not sure if this something that other places do or if its unique to Japan (I’ve only seen this in Japan) but I noticed that in a lot of airports, especially big ones like Haneda Airport, drivers will often just hold out signs with the names of the people who they connected with and need to take around. Our driver was found doing this with my mom and Derek’s father’s name written on his own sign. Most of them were in the Latin alphabet, so I was able to translate things pretty well.
One last thing we needed to do was currency exchange, which luckily there was a station for that. With that, we followed our driver out of the airport and into a parking lot, where we pushed all of our stuff into the van and finally got on to see the scene. As we were waiting in the parking lot, I started to remember how unbelievably hot the East Asian region was. Right now, I could only feel slight warmth, but the heat in this place is crazy and what I experienced the first day in terms of heat was nothing compared to later on.
And finally, we began to leave the airport. As we started to navigate through the maze of roads that made up the airport (Similar to how it took 10 minutes to figure out where to park in LAX) we soon noticed the culture shock that Japan drives on the left side, not the right side. I actually already knew this, having mentioned it a few times on the trip already, but me and Derek both very vividly took notice of the culture shock. Whenever the car turned on a road, I would always expect it to go on the right lane, just like how you would do things in America or Vietnam. This was not the case in Japan, and I had to train my brain over the next few days to expect the car to go on the left side of the road, not the right.
Once we began to drive into the city I realized how grand and massive these buildings really were- it’s hard to find another city to compare to Japan because its skyline and scale are pratically on uncharted proportions. We saw their high-speed bullet trains as we drove through the city, rivers and ports on the coast of Tokyo Bay, and buildings of every type and size.
I would’ve taken pictures of every single building had I remembered to, but my mind was starting to get a little tired from the flight- in San Diego it was already 1030, and us kids had been awake for more than 17 hours, which for us is usually our warning to go to bed. Even worse, I only got 3 or so hours of sleep the night before, so sleep deprivation was making it difficult to do any activities. Our parents had planned a bunch of things to do on just the first day. Still, it was clear that none of that was going to happen simply because we were all tired- Casey completed succumbed to his fatigue during the car ride, Derek tried to act energetic but it was clear he was falling asleep too. I was able to keep my consciousness but it kept getting harder and harder with every minute. Casey managed to steal back 40 ish minutes of sleep on the car ride to our hotel because the city, being as crowded and huge as it is, had a huge congestion problem. We weren’t going slow to the point where I could believe that walking was a faster mode of transportation, but we were going slow to the point where I was annoyed and wanted to see more of the city. I was too tired to complain, and just enjoyed the view that I had. Me and Derek made some random comments about the buildings just to keep ourselves awake, which was getting harder and harder for everyone to do. I was surprised to see that most of the parents could still hold active conversation. I’m not sure if this is because they’re used to this kind of sleep or if they were just hiding the fact that they were tired… it’s just impressive either way because I was too tired to hold any sort of illusion on anyone now. We arrived at our hotel at around 6:00 PM, with a view that looked like this:
(The hotel was called the Granbell hotel)
Once we reached the hotel, everyone’s fatigue got even worse, but I managed to keep my excitement up for long enough to at least check out the hotel room. Before coming, I’d hoped to get a large hotel room because who doesn’t like the space, but I had a feeling that Japanese hotel rooms, for obvious reasons, would be a lot smaller than the Southeast Asian ones we had last year. As it turned out, this hotel room was probably the smallest room I’ve ever had besides the room I stayed in when I was in Saigon, which was a tiny box barely big enough to fit my bed. I wouldn’t call this capsule hotel level since it’s still way bigger than a capsule hotel, but it is a lot more. The hotel room only features one bed (we got two, though, so everyone could sleep) and a tiny bathroom with those fancy toilet seats that everyone knows about. I don’t spend too much time pooping on vacations, so I never really played around with those during the trip, mostly using those for convenience.
After taking a look around our room and having settled down, I was eager pretty much only for sleep. Knowing that I’d only gotten four hours of sleep in the past 24 hours, my parents knew I had to get some sleep or I’d collapse in a really inconvenient spot. They still really wanted to try and go out for the night, so we compromised that I would be allowed to sleep for a bit before going out to find dinner with Derek. I probably did get forty minutes of sleep or so, but I needed a whole dose of nightly sleep to catch up on rest first, so it didn’t feel like I had any sleep at all. Yeah, sorry if you were hoping to see us visit some obscure location or go on a crazy adventure the first day, but that wasn’t happening since I was running on 6 hours of sleep. That’s probably tolerable for a lot of people my age, but I had gotten used to 8 or 9 hours of sleep during the summer and it was pretty annoying to see that taken away, even if it was just for a single day. The scene was great, but it was really blurry; Tokyo is a vibrant place, and they had shops and buildings of every kind…
Even when I was in my nearly-asleep state, I was able to take a few pictures and remember a few details about getting dinner. I noticed after a bit that there were quite a lot of cigarettes just laying around on the floor. Coincidence? I think not. It didn’t take very long to see that there were a lot of people smoking and vaping- like, I noticed and figured it out from the first day. It isn’t as bad as the sketchy bathrooms in my high school, but it’s definitely worse than I expected since I was sure that Japan has strict drug laws. It was a bit weird to see females vaping since I was used to only seeing men in the bathroom doing it but it was pretty normal here.
The city is really vibrant at night, and there are always people walking around at night. Even at 8PM, which in America is usually the time you’d be at home having dinner, most people were walking around, visiting attractions, and enjoying life. There were lots of restaurants and an extremely diverse range of choices which we explored tediously, including many stores that we would be heading to later.
Because everyone was sleepy, it was decided to just get a quick meal and maybe explore around for a short while before finally going to bed. We settled on a dinner in one of the small restaurants on the side of the road for a brief meal (Lowkey don’t even remember what I was eating) and then continued to explore, but by this point it was simply too difficult to ignore the fatigue. It genuinely was difficult to ignore the tiredness that we were all enduring. We passed by a few more interesting things on the way back to our hotel. These included:
- So many vibrant shops that a vibrant shop didn’t look all that vibrant
- A bunch of cosplayers invading one of the streets
So yeah, the first day was definitely already eventful- things looked vibrant and nothing like an American city would – we’d definitely be seeing something new here soon. The next day would be the first real day in Japan, and holy crap, there was so much content in that single day that I might have to stretch it out over two chapters.