The Arrival

If I should describe it, a 15-hour snooze period, where you neither wake up nor sleep would be more or less what happened during the flight. But surprisingly we had good food and a complete row to lay down, since the flight was almost empty. It was also very interesting looking at the window. Since we were flying in the same direction the sun sets, the sky was frozen in twilight for almost the whole flight.

We arrived in Japan! Now the time has come to see if I would be able to understand the people from the country I always longed to know. After following the signs, we arrived at baggage claim. Our bags – and backpack – arrived without problems and customs were pretty quick as well.

And then we found ourselves in an airport exactly on the other side of the world, at 21:45. At the information center we discovered where to change our money and that was also pretty quick and simple. You just fill out a form with the currency and amount and they give you the yens. Very efficient, very fast. And soon we would see that everywhere in Japan, services were impeccable and reliable.

Time to run to the train station! The last train heading for Tokyo (it normally takes 1h20min to arrive at the city by train) would leave soon. But unfortunately we arrived exactly one minute late and the station was already closed. The other option was the bus. A salty price of ¥3.100 each (roughly US$30,00) and a 2h bus ride straight for our hotel in Tokyo.

We arrived close to midnight in a rainy Shinjuku. Our hotel – Keio Plaza – was BIG. It was so big that it even had a whole floor of restaurants! After checking in, a Japanese porter, carrying our bags, showed us the way to our room. In the elevator we saw that the hotel had 46 floors. Our room was really big, even with the extra bed.

After some minutes of unpacking, and laughing in the bathroom (where we discovered the toilet that cleans your buttocks), my parents went straight to bed. I went out to explore.

It was midnight. It was raining. It was finally time. Time to explore.

The workings of a dream

The 8-year-old boy was really happy.

He had just received the most amazing present ever: a portable video-game! His grandmother brought one from Europe. At that time, portables weren’t very common where the boy lived. It was the new sensation, to gather one or two friends and take turns trying to beat the boss of a particular game.

During that time, the little boy was a happy kid. He had good friends and awesome parents and grandparents. He was a very creative boy, making up intrinsic stories and explanations as to why some of his action figures had a missing arm or leg. He loved to draw, loved Godzilla (the movie had just premiered some months ago) and his action-figures – but that didn’t stop him from tearing them apart when the story demanded a dramatic turn of events. He really enjoyed roller-skating and getting together with other kids to play ball at the beach. At night, the boy would go to bed, completely spent. He would dream about impossible creations and wonderful things and when he woke up he would even have a vague recollection of what he dreamt, but the boy never dreamed.

Almost an year after he got his amazing present (he was 9 years old now), he was attending english classes in a language course. He didn’t really enjoy it, but it wasn’t that hard either. After classes, he would get together with a fellow student that also had a portable video-game and they would exchange cartridges every month.

In one of these exchange sessions, the boy noticed a blue cartridge in his colleague’s cartridge options. Curious about the different-coloured game, he chose that one. Later that day, he popped the game into his Game Boy Color and understood almost nothing of it. But curious boys never give up that easy. Some months later, he had already bought the game for himself (at that time, Game Boy cartridges were really cheap) and immersed himself at that game.

Little did the boy know, but that fateful encouter at his english classes were the start of something big, way bigger that that little boy could even imagine. Little gears started to take form inside that boy’s heart.

– One year later –

It was late at night.

Late for him, at least. The 10-year-old boy was walking to a juice store with his father to grab something to eat. The boy wasn’t particularly hungry. He was aiming for the newsstand. In his age, aside from the obvious, there were few things that really mattered to him: The pokémon team he was training in his Game Boy Color to battle the other kids at school – Silver and Gold had just came out a couple of months ago – and the new comic books he would save his money to buy, every two weeks.

After all the waiting – 20 minutes were eternity when you’re young and waiting to get somewhere – the boy and his father started their way back home, passing by a newsstand in the way. Eagerly entering, he began looking for new issues of “Monica’s Gang” (as it is called in english, Turma da Mônica, in portuguese) when he came across a very strange comic.

It was all wrapped in thin plastic and just a little bit bigger than the comics we has used to. But the most puzzling thing was that he could not see the cover very well for an enclosed booklet was covering it. In the booklet’s cover, it read: Read backwards.

The boy decided to buy that comic, instead of Monica’s Gang. Upon arriving home and ripping off the wrap-up plastic, he was perplexed to discover that all the pages were black and white. After reading the small booklet with reading instructions (basically, you just had to read it like a mirror, back to front, right to left) he struggled to finish reading the 100-and-so black and white pages with beautiful drawings. He was dazzled.

That was the time when all the little gears inside that boy’s heart started to slowly tick. A dream had started to take form inside him.

– Fifteen years later –

The boy – now a man – sits on a plane for 15 hours. He’s going to a place pretty far from home. Literally on the other side of the world.

“At last.” – the boy would say to himself in an undertone. He was going to Japan.