After being granted the exchange student papers from TUT, I got the cheapest tickets to Tokyo I could find. Because I was only going to receive the visa pretty late in March and the school was going to start around the first week of April as well, I chose to fly at 25th of March. The flight was already almost fully booked so I was lucky to even get on that one. Then, I got the connection flight ticket from Tokyo Haneda to Memanbetsu as well. The cheapest ticket I could find was a ANA flight with a "Tabiwari" fare, around 100e for the direct connection which would take about 1.5 hours. The ticket service was actually ticketless - through ordering it from the internet, I received no email, no paperwork or anything else regarding the ticket, except for a 3-digit reservation code. However, this was really useful, since I couldn't actually lose any important papers, due to the fact I didn't even have them.
I packed all of my stuff in a backpack, the same one I used for traveling Southeast Asia. There were a few reasons for this - most importantly, the weight limits at Finnair dictated that anything over 20kg had to be paid extra for, so since all the stuff in a suitcase was around 28kg, I lost a few important kilos by just changing to a lighter form of packaging.
On the airport, there were a few hassles right when I arrived - the flight from Helsinki to Narita, Tokyo was late, so my connection flight plan was ruined right on the spot. I had to start arranging it immediately and through Finnair customer service, I eventually could call ANA to make a new reservation, while still keeping the old ticket in case that the plane could catch up at little anyway. However, when finally leaving, it became imminent that were even more late than supposed to, so I would have to cancel my old ticket as soon as possible upon landing. On the plane, doing it was impossible.
I met a Japanese woman called Sari on the airport who had come to Finland to meet her friend and listen to some heavy metal music - "Suomimetalli", as she called it. She spoke a few odd words of Finnish and was living in Tokyo. We talked for some time before boarding the plane, after which we went our separate ways.
On the seat next to me was sitting a Japanese boy called Kenji. In reality, he was 28, but he really looked much younger than that. It's true, almost everyone looks much younger than they really are in Asian countries and I'd noticed it before as well. We talked with Kenji for a long time, until the lights went out and we started to try and sleep a little bit. I couldn't sleep almost at all though, so I just rolled around in my not-so-spacious seat for a few hours more until we started to get closer to Japan. In the nighttime, it was really beautiful to look out of the window and see all the stars clearly, but it was even more beautiful when the morning broke and I could see the ocean through the clouds, as well as parts of China and Russia while crossing to above Hokkaido.
That scenery is familiar to anyone who's ever been on an airplane, but I haven't been to one so many times to get bored of the views.
After landing, I asked Kenji to help me find a telephone so I could call ANA to cancel my flight. By the time we arrived to immigration, there was only one hour of time until my plane was leaving which wasn't nearly enough time. Even by a fastest taxi, it would've been too slow, so me and Kenji found a payphone and were waiting for a few Japanese girls to stop making their call when Sari arrived from an escalator was well. It was a very pleasant surprise, especially because she offered me to use her cellphone. Kenji didn't have one at all and the girls on the payphone didn't stop using it for a good while, so it was a great relief to make the call immediately. But she was a really nice person otherwise too - very friendly and talkative, so it was nice to spend some time with her before parting ways.
In the immigration, Kenji and Sari went to Japanese immigration, which had a line of 3 meters or so - the foreign passport immigration line was probably a 100 meters long. Luckily, things really sped up after a while so I could get out of the formalities by some time. In the line, there were also a few other Finnish students from TUT I had noticed before, both on the airplane and on the airport. One of them was going to Sendai and two others to Kitami. I talked with one of them on the line for just a little bit, but since the line was moving and we weren't exactly next to each other, it was somewhat difficult. After getting out of the formalities, we talked with each other for just a little bit - they were staying in Tokyo but I had to hurry for the next flight which was leaving in three hours and a half.
To get the free ticket for the next flight, I needed to get a paper from Finnair proving that my original flight was late. So, I was bounced between terminals 1 and 2 until I found at least someone to talk to and even after that, I was told to go somewhere else. Eventually, JAL ticket counter personnel wrote me a certification of my flight being late. Then I called my girlfriend and went to a limousine bus for Haneda airport. In that bus, I made a major mistake. I forgot my camera, Canon Ixus 800, to the seat of the bus. However, I only noticed it on Haneda when my flight was about to board, so I asked the flight attendants to help me out with it a little. They called for some sort of manager who gave me a phone number to ask the camera from. They couldn't find it all that soon so I went to the flight without my camera, knowing I wouldn't have it back.
On the flight, I saw two other pale-looking guys. When I say pale, I really mean it - p-a-l-e. I didn't know who they were, just that they weren't definitely Japanese. I went to sit far away from them in the airplane, so we didn't talk at all. We were the only Caucasian people in the airplane though, so it was definitely strange to see them there.
I went to sit with two Japanese middle-aged women next to me. One of them was wearing a white mask, worn by people with a flu or other kind of infectious sickness. After the plane took off, I tried to relax, but I saw the women making origami, the very typical crane type. It was not interesting that they were making them, but that they didn't seem to stop at all. They kept going, making one after other for some time. Then I asked if they could understand any English and asked what were they doing. The woman sitting closer to me tried to explain about it, but I really couldn't understand. She just started to teach me how to make the crane origami myself and after a while, I had finished the first one. Then she asked me to help them and make another one, so I did, but I really couldn't understand what was going on. I just kept making origami for them for a while until a flight stewardess came to ask me if I knew what was going on.
The stewardess told me that the women were following a Japanese tradition - when someone close to them dies, they make a thousand origami and put them on the tree, around the grave or something like that. I couldn't catch all the details, but I understood what was going on. Around that time, I could also clearly see that the other woman, who was wearing a mask, didn't wear it for sickness, but because she was crying. I couldn't ask them who had died, I already felt sad enough to realize what their situation was like. I spent the rest of the time on the flight making origami for them and thinking of people I had lost in one way or another.
After one hour and a half, the flight finally landed on Memanbetsu. Tomomi was there waiting for me behind the glass wall, I could see her as soon as I descended down the escalator. She started smiling as she saw me as did I. The last time we'd seen each other was five months ago. It had been a long wait.
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