Kobe

Dean Vieira’s reference, at last night’s logistical pre-port session, to Japan as the last of our international ports drew deep groans, and not the kind of ironical half-chortles that similar comments had elicited on earlier occasions: the end of the voyage is now in sight, and that’s the source of a good deal of unhappiness, at least on those occasions when we’re made to acknowledge the facts of calendar life.  We’re in Kobe now, and the crew is just now going through the rapid and odd process the rest of us completed in the past hour, according to which a squad of Japanese officials has us all marching through the Union, in one door and out the other, having our temperatures’ taken by a machine that looks like a camera on a tripod and that doesn’t even require us to slow down as we walk past.  We have been warned that this country’s serious in its desire to limit the spread of viruses and such—we’ve all been coached on where and how it is and isn’t OK to sneeze—and this temperature-taking process thus is for us comprehensible, even if bizarre.  Out the window is a kind of scene we’ve become rather accustomed to since it first appeared to us in Cape Town—a busy city with high mountain walls behind it; in the foreground lots of ships; and on shore lots of containers. 

 

And if you’ve been reading this, you may by now feel you know the drill.  In a few minutes a US State Department official will board and brief us; we’ll then go through an immigration process; and we’ll then disperse to various places around this country, reconvening here a few days later to compare notes and get ready for what’s next to come.  When we return this time we really will be in the home stretch, mostly final class sessions, final papers, final exams.  One day off the ship in Hawaii , but otherwise all at sea.  A friend of mine who sailed last year told me that on final arrival he and his family and everyone else he knew on board would have been content for the ship to turn around and start over again, and that now seems entirely understandable to me.  (We’ve a family member who doesn’t like me even to say the words “San Diego,” for all my promises of baseball and zoos and long longed-for food items and such.) 

 

I think all the time how different this would have been if we’d gone, as many SAS voyages do, in the other direction, if we’d begun with our big Pacific crossing and then this rapid barrage of ports, one after the other.  I feel as if our itinerary has been just right, but I suspect every voyager feels that way.  Today we are in Japan; it’s just three days ago we were in China, fifteen days ago in Vietnam, a little over three weeks ago in India. How can that be?  India feels so literally as if it were in another lifetime—I’m perhaps influenced by time spent in Buddhist temples, which will resume tomorrow in Kyoto—that it seems impossible to imagine putting it together with our time here, though that is just what, via email, I just asked the faculty to think about doing with their students on the day after we leave Yokohama.  None of this seems, in any case, like part of a life I can recognize as mine: I never thought I’d see these places.  Indeed, I spent months before the voyage saying that I’d always been happily resigned to that fact of missing these places.  Now that seems like a very stupid thing to have said even once; now I think that visiting China ought to feel like an obligation for every educated American.  The more this goes on, the more we’re struck by how little we know of the world.

 

It’s sunny here and cool, just lovely, though rain’s expected for later in the week.  And everyone I saw in the long line passing by that weird machine seemed hearty and happy and ready to go.

 

PS And I wrote that and then the diplomat came on, and then some Kobe city officials, and now it’s the evening, and everyone’s all around everywhere.