A Trip to Toyo

This is the first part of what may be a rather long story about a couple's adventures in Japan.

*****

Chapter 1

Andy and Chris Martin were a happy, loving couple from a small town in Texas, in the third year of their marriage. They didn't have much, but they had high hopes for a bright future together. All they needed was a little luck. Well, they got it, but neither of them was prepared for what that luck would bring.

Andy and Chris married shortly after graduating from high school and couldn't afford a honeymoon. Andy was working as an apprentice plumber for his father, and Chris worked part-time at a daycare center. They lived in a one-room apartment over Andy's parent's garage. So, a honeymoon just wasn't in their cards.

After three years, things had improved, a little. Chris was now working full-time, with medical benefits. Andy, however, had quit his job and decided to go to a school for automotive maintenance that might, one day, land him a position on a Nascar pit crew, or so the school claimed. The only problem was that the tuition was very high. With Chris' job, they'd secured a student loan to cover the costs. Luck finally seemed to be starting to work for them.

Andy's school was scheduled to start in a couple of months. Until then, they would get by on Chris' salary. She'd earned vacation time, but they couldn't afford to go anywhere. So, it went unused and piled up. They figured they'd save it and use it once Andy got a good job.

One day, Chris was home for lunch and was in the kitchen fixing something to eat. Andy had just come in with the mail. He sat down on their ratty, old sofa and started sorting through it. "Junk mail, junk mail," he recited as he flipped past each item, "bill, junk mail, another bill, past due notice and one more piece of junk mail."

"Past due on what?" Chris asked as she plopped down on the sofa next to her husband. She placed a plate of bologna and cheese sandwiches, with the crust cut off the way he liked them, on the table in front of Andy. He never got tired of looking at her. She was the prettiest girl he'd ever seen. She was tall, lean and blonde, with big, full titties that stuck out proudly on her chest. The rest of her body was tight. She had a perfect ass, not big, just one you could grab onto with both hands. She'd been a cheerleader in school and competed in pageants until her mother got sent away for her third DWI. She'd even been homecoming queen their senior year.

"Credit card," he answered, grabbing a sandwich and biting into it. He smacked his mouth as he chewed, the white bread sticking to the roof of his mouth.

"Which one?" Chris asked. They had two credit cards. They'd had more, but when they ran them up and failed to pay them, the bank cut them off. With their bad credit, they weren't able to get another one. Chris was determined to keep the balances low and make their payments to help build their credit score back up from where Andy had driven it.

"It's the Chase one," he said, chewing. "We got any beer?"

"Chase?" she asked, sounding surprised. "That one has a thousand dollar limit on it. We keep it paid off, so we have it for emergencies. Why the hell is it past due? I didn't even know it was due, to begin with!"

Andy shuffled the mail nervously.

"Did you buy something with it?" she demanded.

"I needed to get some tools for school," he admitted.

"Why didn't you use the Cap One card for that?" she asked, growing a little angry.

"It only had about forty-five bucks available, and the tools were over two hundred."

"You spent two hundred dollars on tools?" she yelled.

"I need them for school," he replied defensively.

"In three months, not now. Why didn't you wait and get the tools with your student loan money? Why you gotta use my money to buy them then let them sit there for a month before you use them? What were you thinking, Andy?"

He shrugged. "It ain't no big thing."

"And why the hell didn't you tell me it needed paying, so I could have paid at least the minimum balance. Now it's past due, and they add on a penalty."

"I knew you'd be mad and start yelling at me for it," he confessed. "I shoulda told you. I'm sorry." He didn't really sound apologetic. Chris could tell he was just saying what he thought she wanted to hear.

"Dammit, Andy, now what are we going to do? How much do we need to pay and by when?"

"Hell if I know," he fired back.

"Did you even open it and look?" she asked, leaning forward to grab the mail off the table.

Andy tried to pull it away from her, "No, but I will. Give it here."

She snatched it away and got up, moving away from Andy. She looked at the envelope. It had red ink all over it. Her mouth fell open as she read what was written. "This isn't a past-due notice, Andy!" She screamed as she ripped the letter open and read it with shaking hands. "They canceled the goddamned card! What the hell, Andy? It says we owe them over six-hundred dollars! What did you do?"

She had been so cautious to avoid using that card. It was the only one they had with a decent balance. They had agreed to only use it for emergencies. The tools were not an emergency, and they sure as hell didn't cost six-hundred bucks.

"We needed new tires on the Jeep," he explained.

"No WE didn't!" she fired back. "You wanted bigger ones for off-roading. You told me your Daddy got you them tires. You lied to me!"

"He got 'em," Andy started, defensively, but continued more calmly, "but I paid for 'em." Andy tried to justify and rationalize his actions. Chris wasn't buying it.

"You know this is going to fuck up our credit even more, don't you?" she yelled, on the verge of tears. "Why can't you just grow up and take care of your responsibilities?"

"I can get more money for the Jeep with them tires on it," he argued.

"Not if you don't sell it. When Andy? When you gonna sell it? You been promising me for a year you'd put it in Autotrader."

"Ok. Ok. Goddammit, you can be such a bitch," he fired back as he stood up and stomped into the kitchen looking for a beer. He jerked open the door of the ancient refrigerator and started rummaging through it. "Where the fuck is the goddamned beer?"

"I'm a bitch?" she yelled at him, "Well, you're an asshole! And a fucking deadbeat!"

Chris looked at the mail in her shaking hands. Something else caught her attention. It was a letter marked "Urgent: Time Sensitive Material" Inside.

"Now what?" she mumbled as she opened the envelope cautiously and pulled out the contents to read. Her eyes got big as she stared at the letter.

"Andy, did you enter a contest from a Japanese car parts company?" she asked excitedly.

"I don't know, maybe. Like six months ago or something. Why?" Andy asked as he walked over and peered at the letter.

"It says we won!" Chris stated, pushing the letter into Andy's hands. "We won the Grand Prize!"

"An all expenses paid trip for two to Japan for two weeks with tickets to the Tokyo Auto Show," Andy read the words out loud. He looked at his wife and smiled.

Chris smiled back.

Maybe their luck was really changing.

Chapter 2

The next day, Andy put the Jeep up for sale. It sold in two days. He got $1,200 more than he'd been asking and got paid in cash. Apparently, the better tires had helped.

On her way home from work, Chris stopped at a RaceTrac to grab an iced tea. While she was in the store, she bought a scratch-off lottery ticket and was shocked when she won two-thousand dollars.

Now, Chris was convinced that luck was absolutely on their side.

They used some of the money she won to buy some luggage and new clothes for the trip. Chris splurged and bought some sexy new undies, a couple of little hot dresses, and some shoes. She worked hard at her job and rarely spent money on herself. She decided she deserved it. If she hadn't checked the discarded mail, they wouldn't be going to Japan. If she hadn't bought the lottery ticket, they wouldn't have won the $2,000.

Even though she believed she earned the money, Chris felt pangs of guilt for using any of it on herself. She knew that they would need the money to pay their bills. She decided to use a big chunk of what was left to pay off the balance on the Chase card. Unfortunately, that evening, Andy came home with an iPad and Chris didn't speak to him for two days.

They had to put in a rush order to get their passports in time for the trip. That cost extra, too. The lottery winnings were dwindling rapidly.

The day of the trip found them nervously excited about what was to happen. They had never been out of Texas, let alone to a foreign country. They had no idea what to expect. Leaving the US was easy; arriving in Japan was a whole nother thing.

Chris was terrified, and Andy was in a state of near panic. The flight had lasted forever and dragged on slowly. Suddenly, in the last few minutes, all hell broke loose. The stewardess ran through tossing out forms to fill out, with no real explanation. Andy was lost and had no clue what to do, so he left it to Chris to figure out. Before she finished, the fasten-seatbelts sign came on, and they landed. The next thing she knew, they were deplaning and being herded out. They exited the airplane and stood inside the gate area, looking around, unsure where to go. The stewardess had said something over the speakers but damned if they understood it. Everyone else walked in one direction, so they followed along.

They drifted with the flow of people through the terminal until they came to a large sign. The horde of other passengers split at this point, about half turning left through a set of sliding doors and the other half continuing straight ahead, through a sort of gate. Andy and Chris stopped and examined the sign. An arrow pointed left with the words "International Arrival - Domestic Transfers," beneath it was another arrow pointing straight ahead that read "Domestic Arrivals." All the other writing, and there was a good deal of it, was in Japanese.

"What the fuck does that mean," Andy asked, pointing at the signs. "We arrived internationally, but we aren't transferring anywhere. Now we're arriving, but are we domestic? Do we go left or straight?"

"I'm not sure, but we're definitely international arrivals," Chris reasoned, "I think we go left."

They took a guess and went through the left-hand doors. They followed the signs that led them on a winding course that eventually landed them at an Immigration checkpoint, featuring very cute and very pink computer terminals. An elderly Japanese woman spoke to them in rapid Japanese and pointed at the computer screen. With no clue what to do, Chris handed the woman both of their passports and all the immigration documents that they had completed during the flight. The woman rattled off a few more words, then used pantomime, indicating that they needed to put their hands on a glass panel. They both did, and a bar of light moved across the glass as it scanned their fingerprints.

They stood motionless, and the old lady barked at them and pointed for them to continue on. Next, they were directed to one of a series of immigration booths, herded like sheep in a slaughterhouse. They followed the people in front of them, moving up to stand in front of a glass enclosure to await their turn with the immigration agent. Three people began shouting at them in Japanese and pointing at a red line painted on the floor that they had not noticed. They had no idea what they were being told to do. After about 15 seconds, one of the people, a middle-aged woman in a uniform, switched to broken English, "Pureezu stando behindo za redo rine."

"Oh! Ok," Chris sputtered, "Come on Andy, stand behind the red rine."

Andy looked around. There was nobody in front of them anymore. The agent at the booth was staring at them impatiently. The people behind them in line were getting agitated. Chris stepped back behind the red line and waved to her husband. "Come on, Andy. Just do it."

The exact instant that Andy stepped behind the line, the agent at the booth waved his hands impatiently and said something that sounded like "High Doe Zoe." They hesitated, not knowing that he had said, "Ok, come on." The uniformed woman spoke again in broken English. "Pureezu go ah-heddo."

Chris shook her head, wondering why they told them to back up just to tell them to go ahead. They walked across the line, and the woman almost had a fit. "On-ree wan!" she shouted, waving her hands to make Andy go back and wait behind the red line. Nervously, Chris approached the booth agent who held out his hand expectantly. She handed him her passport. He took it, flipped through it, stamped a page, closed it and handed it back to her. "Hai, dozo." He said again, gesturing to his right, beyond the booth.

Chris stepped to the side, out of the way, to wait for Andy, but another uninformed person ushered her through the choke point and around behind the booth to wait. Ten seconds later, a flustered looking Andy stepped out to join her. They huddled together, looking about.

They were standing at the top of a wide balcony with stairs leading down on both the left and right sides. It didn't seem to matter which way they went, so Chris picked one and they went downstairs. Uniformed agents immediately ushered them down a hall to another row of computer terminals. Everything was going so quickly and was overwhelming. At the computer, they answered a few questions, in English, and received a receipt of some kind with a QR code printed on it. They had no idea what the paper was for, and they were both completely lost. They didn't question anything at this point but followed along like sheep.

Next, they were herded around a bend and into a rather nice-looking lounge, with rows of chairs and a wall-to-wall computer screen, which looked like something out of a high-tech bingo parlor. A voice was talking to them over the sound system, in Japanese. Of course, they had no clue what was being said. They stood around, wondering what to do. The voice changed into English and told them to sit and wait until their names appeared on the screen, then to proceed to the next station.

Andy leaned over to his wife as they sat in the nice seats. "This reminds me of some science fiction movie from the '70s. You think they're going to lead us into some chamber and turn us into food?"

"I don't think they want to eat us," Chris said, trying to be funny.

They sat and waited for five minutes. Periodically someone would walk in and sit down to wait along with them. After a few minutes, some letters would appear on the screen, and one of the other people would get up like they'd hit BINGO and exit through a set of automatic sliding doors. They waited for several more minutes before Chris slapped Andy's arm and pointed to the screen. Their abbreviations appeared near the top of the screen.

"I think that's us," Chris said, though she was not wholly confident. They stood and approached the exit. A young attendant pointed at a scanner and indicated through hand gestures to scan the QR code they'd been given at the last station. Chris studied her document. The device beeped, and a light on top of it turned green. The attendant gestured to the glass doors which slid open. Chris stepped through them as Andy repeated her actions and emerged to join her a few seconds later.

"This is like some kind of crazy maze game," she said to him, "Do we have to fight a bunch of ninjas at the end to get through it?"

They followed the marked path, noticing most of the other travelers were gone. It was eery. One couple was thirty yards ahead of them, and they couldn't see anyone behind them. Eventually, they continued down the corridor and came to a strangely isolated kiosk in the middle of the large hallway. Next to it stood an odd-looking man. He appeared to be an albino dwarf. The pale little man held out his hands and spoke more words that rapidly flew past their understanding.

Fortunately, Chris had paid attention to the couple whom had gone through ahead of them and did the same thing she saw them do, which was hand over her passport and all the papers she was carrying. The man glanced at them, scanned her passport, then stepped aside to let her pass. Andy followed right behind her.

Finally, they came out of the hallway into a large baggage claim area. At least this seemed somewhat familiar to the pair. They wandered along past several numbered baggage carousels. Finally, Chris spotted a sign behind one which displayed their flight number in large, red letters.

As soon as they walked up, their bags came shooting out of a hole in the wall and worked their way around the winding conveyor belt. Andy grabbed them and pulled them off.

"Now what?" he asked, looking out of his element and out of breath.

"I'm not sure. Looks like another kind of checkpoint," Chris answered, pointing toward the far wall of the large open room. There were several stations that looked a lot like grocery store checkout lines. The signage everywhere was in a mix of Japanese and English. Some of the English didn't really make sense like it was badly translated by Google. She noticed a small sign by one of the lines that said "Customs Inspection."

She grabbed one of the bags and dragged it to the nearest line, just as the only person in it finished and left. The customs agent held out his hand to Chris, "Passuporto, puh-reezu," he said in English that was much clearer than everyone else's so far had been. He took her passport and the last remaining document, glanced at it, then handed her the passport back with a slight bow. He gestured to the automatic sliding doors beyond his checkpoint and said, "Dozo! Welcomu to Ja-pan."

She took her bags and walked through a small turnstile, then waited by the sliding doors for Andy. He was similarly greeted by the agent then walked over to her, raising his eyebrows and whispering, "Wow, is that it?"

"I hope so," she sighed. "Ready?"

"As I'll ever be," he responded.

They turned and walked to the doors which slid open. As they stepped through, they were immediately overwhelmed with a barrage of sensations.

The first was: "Holy shit, it's hot."

Then came: "Why am I covered in sweat?"

Which was immediately followed by: "Dear God, is that humidity?"

In parallel came: "Oh my god it's loud out here. What the hell is all that noise?"

The noise was a cacophony of people talking, mostly in Japanese, but also a mixture of several other unidentified languages. It was combined with numerous announcements over loudspeakers, people shouting out for something, like sideshow hawkers. They heard bits and pieces of things like: "May I have your attention, kochira dozo, momonaku, the Narita express" and much more, all blending together.

The last thing that hit them was: "Oh my God, this place is wall to wall people, and they're all Asian!"

As far as they could see, everyone appeared to be about five feet tall with black hair. Of course, that's not at all the reality, but it was their impression. With it came a deep feeling of "We are not in Texas anymore."

Andy and Chris stood there, frozen in place, for a minute or two, just looking around and allowing their brains to adjust. Finally, Chris got her wits about her enough to pull out a printout of the e-mail she had received with instructions for what to do upon arrival. She scanned down it and found the relevant section.

"Ok, it says that first, we should get some Japanese money. We can go to the Currency Exchange counter outside the exit from the Customs area."

She looked around and spotted a small counter with signs all over it showing different international currencies. "I think that's it. It also says if we don't have cash on us to exchange, we can just withdraw money from the ATM machines by the counter. It converts the money automatically."