It was an extraordinary day in my life. I was checking my email from home early in the morning, and was ecstatic to see an invitation to visit Japan, the land of the rising sun.
My close friend and past colleague Jay had relocated to Japan just a year back. Before he moved to Japan we had worked together on building a new business unit. We travelled together on business visits and had discussed several plans for growing the business over the wee hours of night after the business meetings were over. Jay had moved to Japan in order to build his career, however a part of his heart was still with us. We used to exchange emails regularly, and I used to provide him updates on the progress of our plans that we built together. Phone conversation was very expensive and not financially possible.
As I was already aware, homes in Japan are really small, and it is very difficult to host visitors without making some arrangements. Jay’s neighbour and his colleague in Japan was visiting India along with his family during a particular week, and his apartment was available for stay. Before inviting me Jay had talked to Navin about sparing his apartment, and Navin had agreed wholeheartedly, without thinking even once.
If I could plan my trip exactly during the same week, it was possible to stay with Jay.
I had never thought of visiting Japan. There were many difficulties. Staying and eating in Japan is very expensive, and a trip using the normal tourist way of travelling would have been out of my reach. Very few people in Japan know English, or any other language I knew, and learning Japanese was very difficult for me. I had heard horror stories about Japanese food, and getting Indian food in restaurants was out of question.
Jay solved all my problems.
“You can stay with us, so you don’t have to pay for accommodation. Dinner will be at home and you can carry packed food for breakfast and lunch. Radhika will be very happy to cook for all of us. I will plan for all of your visits, I have visited these places before and I can give you very detailed instructions to complete your every day trip, without knowing Japanese. It is a summertime, it will not be very cold, and if required we have a couple of extra jackets. Only thing that remains is the cost of travel, if you can pay for the flight from Mumbai, and a JRail pass for a week, you are all set.”
There was enough time to plan the trip. The first thing I did was to check with my wife, she was very excited at the thought of visiting Japan. She knew Jay and Radhika very well and did not have any hesitation to accept their invitation to stay with them. Next thing was to check the business calendar, since I was planning well in advance, the calendar looked pretty clean during those days. Same day I talked to my manager in the office and applied for one week leave. The manager was very supportive. Our daughter was very young, and we were pretty sure that she would not enjoy the trip. My parents agreed to take care of her for a week.
And it was “Clear to go”.
Invitation letter, tickets, visa, purchasing yens everything was just a formality, which was taken care of, except the JRail pass, which is a separate story altogether.
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