Well, the plane didn't erupt into a giant fireball and rain down to earth, and the authorities didn't chuck me out by the shirttails at the gate, so it looks like I'm back in Japan!

There was hardly any wait to take off, a credit perhaps to that wonderful Japanese punctuality, or at least to their airline's lack of bankruptcy. Then again, with the quiet hum and whoosh of the contained air and the tacit pre-takeoff consensus on silence among the passengers, I might have been sitting there looking out the window for three hours and not felt a second tick by. It's possible that I arrived in Narita not one second older than I was when I left: it must be something they mix with the air.

The plane does a funny sort of dance before takeoff, racing the huge jet engines two or three times just to go fifty feet on the runway - like a silly cat coiling and adjusting every inch of itself with its eyes on the little foil ball. For whole minutes it sits there deciding which foot to lead with and which is the precise most aerodynamic position for its tail, and finally the moment has arrived for it to deliver the steel-trap coup-de-grace, the bone-shattering fatal blow, and it gives sort of a perfunctory hop and then flops over on the floor well short of the mark. The letdown is palpable, but for all the while the suspense was building, its excitement was your own.

According to JAL's flight map, the entire top half of Canada is a barren, uncharted wasteland. It's easy to see why - the entire top half of Canada is a barren, uncharted wasteland. Nobody lives there. It stretches out in every direction as far as the eye can see - which is really far from an airplane - flat and gray-green, perforated with little round black lakes like shadows at the bottom of hills, but the land is flat and there's nothing there. It looks precisely like someone dragged a glacier over it.

JAL has the best service of any airline I've ever been on. Before meals (which are delicious), they offer soda, cold tea, or various Japanese and Western alcoholic drinks. With the meal they serve a cold drink, and immediately after serving the meal they come around with coffee, Japanese tea and "English tea." Ten minutes later they come by with coffee refills, and five minutes after that they offer both teas again (Japanese in a ceramic Japanese teapot, and English in a takkm elegant metal one - for veracitude) because they realize that most people can't handle two drinks at the same time and didn't take it the first time around. They know this, and build it in to the schedule: they take their passengers' hydration very seriously.

Unfortunately, when flying, one's organs are kind of tense, and it only takes about three sips of water and half an hour before getting to the bathroom becomes one's most urgent objective. And one was stuck in the window seat the entire time. Oy.

Dinner was a tasty and non-poisonous seafood curry with shrimp and tiny scallops, shiitake mushrooms and carrots, rice, salad and some kind of fluffy apple cake which made me happy. Plum wine, then water, then hot green tea, a refill of hot green tea because I accidentally met the flight attendant's eye, then a complimentary bottle of water. And that's saying nothing of breakfast.

The flight attendants have the bestest aprons (tied around their achingly slender selves) -- gray-blue with a pattern of buildings and streets seen from a bird's-eye view in darker gray-blue. Over that are randomly-placed old-fashioned dirigibles in antique yellow hues, flying over the streets and buildings at whimsical angles. How very aeronautical. Aviatory?

All in all it was a very pleasant flight - but I sustained my first casualty trying to wrestle my heavy bag onto the baggage cart, and that casualty was the blood vessels in my right forearm. I got a fantastic twin quasar of a bruise from where the skin got pinched by the sixty-pound suitcase. Unfortunately, the time when one arrives in Japan is always the time when one is least prepared to do so, and really would rather not. If you have to transfer in Tokyo, don't bring any luggage if you can help it, because you will be tired and sweaty and people will be speaking Japanese to you and you will drop it on your foot. And you will want to go home and get into bed and dream of someday flying to Japan.