The amazing Matsue TOMODACHI committee that planned our trip.

Getting to Matsue isn’t easy. The trip from New Orleans takes about a day on a multi-point route that goes something like: New Orleans > Dallas > Narita > a bus through Tokyo to Haneda Airport > Izumo > and finally a short drive to Matsue. If you haven’t prepared adequately, you’ll find yourself thrust a day ahead, likely dehydrated from all the in-flight wine (if you’re me), and hyper aware of that fact that no one is speaking English…not even a little bit.

Man texting at the Narita Airport train terminal.

When I imagined arriving in Japan for the first time, the imagery was usually some whiplash inducing montage of Shinjuku’s kaleidoscopic neon streets, smiling geisha, bowing mascots, roaring kanpai toasts, and hai chizu photo-ops set to a soundtrack  of early 2000 Hamasaki Ayumi. “This was Japan”, I mused or at least the one that movies like Sophia Coppola’s orientalist Lost in Translation would have you believe. My point of arrival was Narita Airport, a functional, but by no means extravagant, airport that reads the same as any airport, except the fact that everyone and everything was rendered Japanese. Shuffling about aimlessly through Narita was actually something I expected, but that’s about where it ended.