“Narita Control Tower One to Base HQ. I see potential snow clouds on the horizon, somewhere over Siberia. Quick: Shut down the airport!” Source: Banbam/Wikimedia Commons.

JAPAN HAS A LOT TO OFFER TRAVELERS, just not the things that tourists want, like food that doesn’t move, a reduced level of karaoke, and snow plows.

Especially snow plows.

When two inches of snow fall onto Narita airport, the Japanese authorities respond as though the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had shown up demanding connecting business-class flights to Osaka—or else! In comparison, when we New Yorkers get two inches of snow, we send our youngest child to clear the sidewalk (or airport runway) with an old broom while we go back to watching football, eating chips, and drinking beer. It’s what International Relations majors call “cultural differences.”

As in, New Yorkers deal. Japanese squeal.

All Right, Mark. Don’t Be Nasty. Just Get on with the Story

Ostensibly, I was in Tokyo on a Legitimate Journalism Assignment to write about the Keio Plaza, only the third skyscraper in Japan, built in 1971, and the nation’s first-ever skyscraper-hotel. In reality, I was using the assignment as a dodge to visit my daughter, a high school teacher in Tokyo, otherwise known as “having your cake and expensing it, too.”

Problem: The hotel wasn’t new, and I needed an angle. The 1,438-room Keio has 15 restaurants, which is when the following thought entered my brain, fully formed and arguably insane: I’d pull off a journalism stunt by eating every meal at a different hotel dining spot over the course of three days. No ramen restaurants in the Ginza. No seafood stew in the Toyosu fish market. No yakitori in Shinjuku’s Piss Alley. Nope. Every meal in the Keio—three different restaurants every day.

We had pre-dead shrimp that were brushed in their own chopped liver. An acquired taste, to be sure.

Don’t get me wrong. Dining at the Keio wasn’t exactly hardship duty. But it was…unusual. Some examples:

Soujuan: The hotel’s kaiseki restaurant. In Japanese, and I am not making this up, kaiseki means “stone in stomach.” A good P.R. firm might be useful here. A highlight of Soujuan’s menu is fugu, a blowfish so spectacularly poisonous that a chef has to have an official certificate to cook it. In case you’re wondering, fugu is both chewy and jelly-like at the same time, kind of like the forgotten pack of Chuckles that’s been composting at the bottom of your backpack since approximately the Obama administration. Or maybe I felt that way because of the nonstop glasses of unfiltered sake, served cold, that I was required to drink. To uphold America’s honor.

Glass Court: The hotel’s family-friendly restaurant. The Glass Court is, in academic culinary terminology, “a hot mess”: ham and congee, scrambled eggs and pumpkin salad, fried chicken and “Chinese-style” noodles, vegetable juice and “fluit” juice. The diners came from everywhere—India, United States, China, South America, and Europe. The crowded serving stations yielded no accidents while I was there, but it was a miracle none occurred. People back up without warning, others make abrupt turns when their food radar homes in on a particularly attractive dish, children romp around at waist height, and hundreds of hungry people bash about with large trays and wide eyes, intent on falling into a food coma. The best things I can say about the Glass Court is that there is a lot of food, and the atmosphere is very buffet-like.

Kyubey: The hotel’s sushi restaurant. We had pre-dead shrimp that were brushed in their own chopped liver. An acquired taste, to be sure. Next, the chef carved up the still-kicking shrimp before our eyes, shelled and deveined them in a flash, then delicately sliced them halfway lengthwise to allow them to, and I am quoting the chef here, “open more fully.” My shrimp was still dancing when I ate it. Finally came the roasted heads and backs of the shrimp we’d recently consumed. Not a lot of flavor, but really crunchy, if that’s your thing. Nothing goes to waste at Kyubey! The meal was memorable. The memories are…complicated.

There were other restaurants, but you probably want to eat dinner tonight, and I don’t want to put you off your feed, so I’ll change the subject.

And Now, the Part Where Things Get Worse

I was able to spend a few days with my daughter in Kyoto and Tokyo, where she was teaching English. But then I had to say goodbye and head to the airport.

Nonstop Tokyo to New York is a long haul, so I coughed up some of my accumulated frequent flyer points for a biz-class ticket. The lounge was wonderful: comfortable seats, hot hors d’oeuvres, soups, snacks, a full bar for cocktails, and a robotic beer machine that would automatically pour you a draft of Kirin while you watched.

I had one of those character-building departure times that often happen in Asia: just after midnight. So when an announcement came over the loudspeaker, at about 11 p.m., saying that everyone had to go to their boarding area, my first thought was, “Good timing.”

I was one of the last flyers out of the lounge. I thought it was strange that almost exactly as I left the room, the door closed with a loud and distinctive thud, the lights went out, and a bone-chilling sense of abandonment descended on me.

“Uh oh,” I said, with the instinctive journalism insight that has defined my career. “Dis don’t look so good.”

A Space on the Floor, Anywhere

No sooner had the business-class lounge emptied than a booming voice came over the terminal speakers, first in Japanese, then in no-nonsense English.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the airport is closed. Because of the inclement weather, all departing flights have been canceled.”

That was the complete announcement. No apologies. No timeline. No suggestions. Just: airport closed, good luck, we’ll see you when we see you. I looked out at the windows overlooking the runway. There was a dusting of powder on the tarmac. The snow wouldn’t have covered an upright quarter. In Buffalo, no one would even have noticed.

But in Tokyo? No airport.

You might say, “Well, gee, Mark, why didn’t you hop onto the Narita Express train back to Tokyo or just get a room at one of the airport hotels?”

The carpeted floor was, inexplicably, full of dirt and sand. It smelled like a second-rate gym. Perfect.

All right, smart alec, I’ll tell you. There is a gap, which I will allow you to contemplate at your leisure, between “flight cancelled at 11 p.m.” and “train stopped running at 10 p.m.” I will not editorialize on this gap. I don’t have to. Also, if you were to stay at an airport hotel and your flight was rescheduled at, say, 3 a.m., how would you know it if you weren’t in the terminal? Still, I had to find some place to bunk down for the night.

I scanned the terminal waiting areas. Every seat was filled. People were laying out blankets and sleeping bags in the aisles, next to the bathrooms, over by the bar, everywhere. Not a horizontal spot to be had. The scene was reminiscent of a Bangladeshi refugee camp after a flood circa 1971, except with more designer luggage and a Duty Free shop selling Johnnie Walker at prices that, under the circumstances, seemed almost reasonable.

I found an entryway to a closed boutique, a recessed doorway with display cases on either side, a place where no one would accidentally step on me as they valiantly tried to find the bathroom at 4 a.m. The carpeted floor was, inexplicably, full of dirt and sand. It smelled like a second-rate gym.

“Perfect,” I said.

At 7 a.m., I gathered my belongings and went back to the Japan Air business lounge, a man who had slept for a total of 38 minutes and was now determined to regain his dignity.

“I’m sorry, but we can’t admit you,” said the leprechaun-like woman at the entrance. “Your flight was scheduled to depart last night.”

I could write a Biblical-length chapter about the next few minutes. But if you fly, you understand. I was screwed, and there was no unscrewing me.

The Same Flight, But Now It’s Tomorrow

Ironically, my flight was reskedded for the exact same departure time, just 24 hours later. This is the kind of irony that the universe deploys when it wants you to know it has been paying attention to you, specifically.

Usually when I board an airplane, I like to get settled right away—where’s the charger outlet, are there blankets somewhere, what movies are playing, what’s on the menu, etc.? And in business class, add to that staging regimen a request for a nice cold glass of the bubbly before takeoff.

Not this time.

In the day and evening leading up to the rebooked flight, I got no additional sleep at all. From 7 a.m. until boarding at 11 p.m., I spent most of my time in the bar posting woe-is-me Facebook rants.

No, as soon as I sat down in that cushy business-class seat, I buckled myself in and conked out. Completely. Utterly. I am confident that you could not have revived me with a dentist’s drill, a Bavarian oompah band, or an unexpected digital rectal examination.

I woke up 30 minutes before touchdown at JFK after 13 hours and 25 minutes of straight-up unconsciousness.

A Medical Epilogue, Since We’re Here

Fast forward five days. Every time I took a deep breath, I felt a sharp pinch on my right side, about halfway between my shoulders and my waist. So, of course, I took the problem to kindly ol’ Doc McGargle.

“You mean, you didn’t even move?” asked Dr. Mac, when I explained I’d been more or less comatose for 13-plus hours. “Not at all?!”

He immediately sent me to the nearby emergency room for a D-dimer test. Trust me, you do not want to hear your doctor say D-dimer test.

The scans and X-rays and poking and prodding resulted in an undesirable pronouncement: I had a pulmonary embolism, which is Latin for prepare your will. Apparently, not having moved for 13 hours and 25 minutes has that effect on people in a certain IQ bracket. The nurses, a little too gleefully, I thought, jabbed me in the stomach with really large needles to send in the blood-thinning meds. The next morning, I went home. Kindly ol’ Doc McGargle prescribed Eliquis for the next six months. I took it. I recovered. I am here.

So in conclusion, I’d like to say that if you want to eat shrimp that are dead but don’t know it yet, and then get a blood clot in your lungs, lemme know. I just might have an itinerary for you.

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