A Day at Haneda Airport

For the past few months my mother and I have been planning a trip to Japan together. I left Bangkok the night before we were meant to meet up and arrived in Tokyo around 5am. The plan was for Mom to arrive just a few hours later, but unfortunately, our journey was to get off to a bit of an inauspicious start.

As soon as I touched down at Haneda Airport and connected to the local network, I was met with several texts telling me that her flight had been delayed again and again. As soon as I passed through immigration, I was finally able to call Mom, who was still sitting inside DFW airport waiting for her flight.

Oh well. We hadn't planned anything for the first day on purpose, but it looked as if I was going to be stuck at Haneda for a while. I decided to make the most of it.

The first order of business was to find a place to take a rest. I had flown overnight but hadn't slept well on the airplane. I decided that instead of just hanging out in the terminal all day, I would check in at the airport's capsule hotel for a few hours to take a nap to pass the time and hopefully feel as good and refreshed as possible for our adventure.

I always enjoy staying at capsule hotels, particularly in Japan. I paid for six hours, and was given a towel, a toothbrush, and a small but very comfortable capsule to call my own. I had a nice hot shower (they also offered an onsen, but I wasn't assimilated into Japan to bathe nude with strangers yet) and a nap, and after a cup of iced coffee in the hotel's lounge, I was ready to step out and explore the rest of the airport.

The airport is home to a small Shinto shrine, and I spent some time trying to find out where it was. Turns out, it was actually just down a hallway next to the capsule hotel!

The tiny shrine is the only one at the airport, and it functions much like a Muslim prayer room or airport chapel. People will stop by to pray for safe travels before their flight.

Shinto is the indigenous religion of Japan. An animistic religion with lots of emphasis on nature, spirits, and the sacredness of all things, Shinto permeates many aspects of Japanese life and culture. This was just the first of many Shinto shrines that I'd be visiting during my stay.

One of the outstanding features of the international terminal is the huge wooden bridge that soars above the check-in counters at the departures hall.

This is the Haneda Nihonbashi Bridge, a replica of the 17th century Nihonbashi Bridge, the point in Edo (now Tokyo) from which all distances across the country to the capital were measured. I saw crossing the airport bridge as a way to symbolically begin my own journey across Japan.

I spent some time in the afternoon sitting at the airport's observation deck and watching the planes come in. I always enjoy doing this when I have a layover in Japan, but it was mid-September, and autumn still felt very far away in Tokyo. I didn't end up sitting outside for too long.

My mom's flight from Dallas finally arrived around 10pm. In the end, I had spent 17 hours at the airport and was glad to climb into the back of a taxi and leave it behind us. The wait hadn't been too bad, all things said and done, and there are far, far worse airports to be stuck at (cough LAX).

It was late when we arrived at our hotel in Asakusa. We had made a mistake with the booking and had ended up with a tiny room for our first night (we would switch to a bigger room for the rest of our stay), but we were both so tired that we didn't mind. After about half an hour of bumping into each other trying to get ready for bed in our comically small hotel room, Mom and I were finally able to crash and get some rest after a very long day.