18. Montana bound

via Seattle

Joe called the other night. He got right down to business. “So why did they kill him?”

Dan-Abe?

Joe-Yes, Abe. Why did they kill him?

Dan-I don't know. I don't follow politics close enough here to judge why they'd want to off him.

J-What happened right after he retired?

D-The fake pandemic got underway?

J-No! He was in office then. After that.

D-The war with Russia started? (I wasn't thinking. I knew Kishida had been in since well before February, 2022.)

J-Between those two.

D-...Ummm. The vaccine?

J-Bingo!

D-He got out before they started distributing it?

J-Yes! He knew it was all a fraud. He didn't want to have anything to do with it. And he's too much of a risk. He knows too much.

D-So they offed him.

J-Can you think of a better reason?

D-I guess not. But do you really think he was going to go public and blow the lid on the whole thing?

J-They're not taking chances, man.

D-I guess maybe they had to Magufuli him before he opened his mouth. It's one thing for a president of an obscure African nation to talk about PCR-positive papayas and goats, but maybe the recent prime minister of the world's 3rd largest economy could bring the whole scam down.

J-Exactly. You know what's funny, though?

D-What?

J-I was watching a video of the shooting, and of course in the comment section they were speculating on why they shot him.

D-Did anybody bring up that stupid argument that says the shooter was able to get to him because the security detail weren't expecting an assassin with a gun because Japan isn't a gun culture?” I mean, come on.

J-Yeah, I think I saw that. But the funny thing was, most people weren't even asking about the shooting. Instead they were saying, “Why the heck are the Japanese still wearing masks?”

Why the heck indeed. I would say it's a country of compliance, but even that doesn't fully explain the never-ending mask madness over here. Don't they see the rest of the world? You can't avoid turning on the TV and seeing footage from other countries with everyone mask-free. If you watch Shohei Otani in an Angels game, you'll see fans packing the seats, and nobody is masked. How does this not escape the Japanese viewer? And now you even have the government finally at least saying masks are not necessary outdoors, but almost everyone keeps wearing them out on the streets and even in the parks, even when they are alone. Outside, you can't even say it's a question of compliance and obedience anymore. Nobody is compelling you. It's been normalized and internalized.

Of course the cruelest and most damaging angle of this is the masking of children. At a party recently, I was congratulating a woman for having her daughter in a nursery school where masks aren't worn. I’ve seen some pre-school-aged kids masked up here, and I’ve been by pre schools where all the teachers are masked. By the time the kids are in first grade, they all wear the mask. Ditto jr. and sr. high, university, the workplace, etc. My twin boys are masked like everyone else. I want them to remove it- I don't think the school can compel them to wear it, but they're already unique as the half foreigners and they don't want to stick out any more. Thank goodness for the 7-month Corona-madness hiatus we had in Montana back in 2020.

Andy, the less obedient and conformist of the two, is pretty sick of the whole covid routine and school in general. He started reminiscing about Montana about a year ago. I decided we should go back and yesterday I pulled him out of school a couple weeks before the start of summer break; prices for tickets are already stratospheric and if I wait until his vacation it might be too much to afford. Today we began what will be a 26 hour trip to Seattle, where we will hang for 5 days before moving on to Montana.

I would estimate we saw a good 4 or 500 people at the stations and in the trains between home and Narita airport. I only saw two non-maskers in addition to myself.

Light pedestrian traffic today outside Ueno station- which means ample room to social distance, yet the masks remain.

Center-left: One of us! Mr. Suzuki, maskless, walks with a swagger... ignoring the sign.

Ueno station ticket machine mural art.

Rice fields outside of Narita.

Nobody bothered me about the mask from home all the way to Narita. The one person to ask me to mask up was the Filipina greeter at the ticketing line for Hawaiian Airlines.

“Do you have your mask?” she asked kindly.

“No, I'm sorry. I don't,” I said cheerfully as I walked by her to join my son in the line, before she could move to escalation step 2.

Halfway through the ticketing line there was a vaccination checkpoint.

“Could I see your vaccination papers.”

“I don't have any.”

“You…you don't?!”

-No

-You haven't been vaccinated?

-No, we're Americans. (Foreigners still have to get the jab, to our shame. For Americans they don't require the vaccination or the PCR test.)

He was somewhat taken aback by this. Everybody else was producing the necessary paperwork without delay.

-Do you have some allergy?

-Nope. Just not getting the vaccine.

He stared at us for a second then went to his desk. He handed us a paper to fill out with details of our intended lodgings in the US, ostensibly for contact tracing. I wrote where we’d be in Seattle, out of curiosity to see if they actually tried to contact and follow us. As for Montana, I can’t see contract tracers getting a very nice welcome, outside of Whitefish, Missoula and perhaps Billings. He wrote OK on it and had us hand it to the ticketing agent.

At the gate I again saw the Filipina lady, working another line entrance. “Sir, could you put your mask on?”

This time I said, in Japanese, “I'm sorry, I have an irregular heartbeat and afib,” and I continued to walk to the gate. That either satisfied her or confused her enough for her to not pursue me.

I made it all the way to Honolulu airport without wearing the mask.

Kenji, the friendly patrol robot by Secom, giving orders in seven languages. Today Kenji, tomorrow Jennifer, the charming Boston Dynamics patrol dogbot who can detect the unvaxxed and rip their heads off, for our collective safety.

Next: report from Seattle