The immigration official at Haneda Airport looked bored. ‘Your purpose in Japan?’ he asked, barely stifling a yawn.

I could hardly tell him that I was planning to find a job teaching English so I could stay for a year and study Japanese, so I mumbled something about being interested in Japanese culture and wanting to see as many temples and shrines as I could.

The look on the man’s face told me he’d heard that one before, and more than once.  His nostrils widened a little as he struggled to suppress another yawn. ‘Where will you stay?’

I fumbled in my wallet for my international youth hostel card and showed it to him.

He glanced at it.  ‘Youth hostel?   Where? Here in Tokyo?’

I nodded. ‘In Ichigaya.’

He looked at my passport again. ‘How much money do you have?’ he queried, sounding like he could hardly have cared less.

I quickly pulled out my book of travellers’ checks and riffled through them.  It wasn’t much, but I reckoned I could last for a month – possibly even two, if push came to shove.

The official looked at my travellers’ checks as though he’d seen them before, too. But he nodded again as he stamped my passport. ‘Welcome to Japan.’

On the train from Haneda to Tokyo, I felt stunned. I could hardly believe I’d actually arrived. I’d left so much behind me:  my long-suffering boyfriend David in Manhattan, my parents in Southern California, my friends and former housemates in San Francisco. I hadn’t been in Japan for an hour and I was already starting to miss them.

Although it was mid-September, the weather was so hot and humid I longed to take off my heavy backpack and sit down in air-conditioned comfort.  I stared out of the train windows at Japanese houses and fields as they flashed past me. I’m here, I said to myself. I’ve arrived.

My flight from San Francisco to Tokyo had included two stopovers; I’d just had two days in Hong Kong and three days in Taiwan, and they’d been doozies.

In Hong Kong, I’d hooked up with a couple of girls from the Midwest at the airport. Our flight was two hours late, and we ended up arriving at 11:00 at night. They didn’t have reservations either, so the three of us we decided to take a taxi to the YWCA in Kowloon.

As we left the air-conditioned airport terminal, it was as though we had stepped into a wall of exhaust-scented steam. The heat was like a living force with a heartbeat and a personality of its own. It seemed amazing that it could be so hot when it was this close to midnight. I was grateful to have two companions; absurdly, I looked about me and suddenly realized that I was in a foreign country. 

At least a dozen taxis were idling in a long, smoky line, waiting for passengers, their drivers scanning us travellers as we left the terminal. I didn’t have a clue what to do, but the girls from Minnesota were a more practical pair.

‘Y.W.C.A.?’ asked Maureen, showing one of the drivers her tourist book. He seemed to study it, then nodded, and we all piled in.

Kowloon was a mess of neon and concrete, crowds of people, brightly lit signs. I stared out of my window, fascinated.

‘We’re on the wrong side of the road!’ laughed Lorraine. Sure enough, all the cars were driving on the left side of the road. Until Lorraine mentioned it, I hadn’t even noticed.

After about twenty minutes, our driver pulled into a dark, trash-filled alleyway in what seemed to be a very seedy neighborhood.  He stopped the taxi in front of a mess of rat-infested boxes stacked up alongside a dingy wall.

‘Here lady. We are here, Y –W- C- A.’ He pointed to the fare displayed on the meter.

‘But this can’t be the Y.W.C.A.!’ we all protested.

He shook his head stubbornly. ‘Yes. Y.W.C.A. You pay me now.’

We tried to protest, but what could we do?  Our driver was absolutely insistent. And we were in a foreign country, after all – we couldn’t expect things to be the way they were back home.  Perhaps the YWCA really was just around the corner in a more salubrious looking neighborhood? 

‘This is creepy,’ I said.

‘Mmm,’ murmured Maureen, looking in her guidebook and trying to find a street sign somewhere that gave us an indication of where we were. There were none that any of us could see.  There was a skittering noise: a large rat poked its whiskered face out from one of the boxes and we all jumped half a foot.

The second taxi appeared miraculously less than two minutes after we had figured out that we really were nowhere near our destination.  Predictably, we were delighted to find a cab in such an awful neighborhood, and we all climbed in and showed the man the guidebook.

‘Y.W.C.A.?’  Lorraine said hopefully, and the man looked at the book and frowned, then nodded. The taxi took off in a burst of speed and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Kind of a coincidence that he showed up so fast when there weren’t any other taxis in sight,’ said Maureen after a few minutes.

‘A little bit too much of one, I’d say,’ agreed Lorraine.

I was looking out of the window. ‘Hey!  We just passed that building a couple of minutes ago,’ I said.

Lorraine and Maureen looked to where I was pointing, a large building in the midst of a whole concrete jungle of shining, neon-accented glass-and-steel.

‘I thought so!’ cried Maureen. ‘But how can you tell?’

‘See that sign?  It says Great Sun and then just underneath it there’s the character for  flowers. And next to it something or other that means pearls, I think. Anyway, we passed it earlier, maybe two minutes ago.’

‘How can you read that?’ asked Lorraine. ‘You said you were studying Japanese.’

‘Well, the Japanese got their characters from the Chinese and most of them are still the same. Those characters are the same in both languages.’

We all stared at the back of our taxi driver’s neck.

‘Excuse me!’ said Lorraine, the bravest one of us.

He ignored her.

‘Excuse me, sir!’ she and Maureen chorused.

He half turned around. ‘No English.’

‘Take us to the YWCA!  We’re all students!  We don’t have much money!’

‘No English.’

‘This woman can read Chinese!’ Lorraine persisted, pointing at me.  ‘She knows you’re taking us the long way around ‘cause she can read characters on the signs! We’ve just passed that building! Was that your friend back there who pretended to take us to the YWCA and then left us stranded?  I’ll bet he took us to you, didn’t he? What’s your name?’  She craned her neck and pretended to be reading the man’s license, then she turned to me.  ‘Mary, can you read his name?’

I cringed and tried to sink a little into my seat.  I hate conflicts. And besides, I couldn’t have read the man’s name for any amount of money. Signs are one thing – the easy ones are a piece of cake. But people’s names are tough and even if I’d managed to read a few of the characters, I could never have pronounced them in Chinese.

The taxi driver shrugged and continued to ignore us, but he took us to the YWCA. without any further detours.

At the YWCA reception desk, I noticed that the desk clerk, a round-faced girl in her late teens, was studying Japanese: she had a Japanese textbook open in front of her. 

‘Can you speak Japanese?’ I asked her.  At least I had enough Japanese to do that.

‘Yes!  You too?’ 

‘Yes.’

‘How long have you been studying it?’

‘Two years. How about you?’

‘Three months.’

I was stunned. She had a thick accent, but I could see from the content of her textbook that her Japanese was leaps and bounds ahead of mine.

Maureen and Lorraine stared at us while we engaged in the simplest of conversations. Unaware of the basic nature of our conversation or my many mistakes, they looked at me admiringly; I might as well have been speaking in tongues -- or negotiating a particularly difficult and skillful piece of interpreting.

‘Gosh. You really can speak it!’

'It must be wonderful to be bilingual, Mary!'

God.  If they only knew.