Tokyo Nights
N35°40.29′ E140°42.44′
1410 ZULU
Below us in the darkness, the eastern half of Japan breaks free from the cloud layer like an old-school movie monster emerging from the sea with tendrils of mist running down the back of its mountainous spine. Freed from their opaque covering, the urban lights of Tokyo burn furiously in the distance, radiating upwards into the night sky… a glow so massive that it seems to fill in the slight, visible curve of the earth. The cockpit has finally warmed up—the last of the cold, damp Korean air purged out into the night—and I lean forward with my chin resting on the top of the glare shield watching as the starry night sky fades to dull, empty black in the face of the oncoming city lights.
Just over two hours ago we had emerged from the top of the weather as we climbed out of Incheon—the filtered Korean landscape of cities and open space spreading out around us like a bluish-gray sheet of liquid magma. Even in the darkness, the sense of vast expanse felt like a relief after the long taxi to the runway through heavy blowing mists that buffeted the airframe and limited our view ahead to just a few centerline lights as we crawled forward into the void. The takeoff had felt like we were fixed in place, the dim confines of the outside world rushing past us in a rapid wet blur of light and dark. Rotation was a further severing of reality—until the haloed lights of the runway rapidly dropped and dimmed below us and nothing remained of the outside world except a faint glow from our landing lights and the rhythmical double silver-red flash of our strobe and anti-collision lights.
The 48 hours prior to takeoff had felt almost equally as isolating. Covid restrictions still keep aircrew confined to their hotel, and beyond the good breakfast buffet and well-appointed gym, I’d spent hours staring out my room’s window at the steady flow of airplanes launching to the south—while the visibility waxed and waned from clear to haze to fog to darkness and back. Finally freed from the hotel, the whole crew had spent several intentionally slow minutes—despite the cold—unloading our bags from the bus at the airport, savoring the damp air while watching the fingers of fog and mist massaging the light stanchions over the terminal roadway. When we could justifiably delay no longer, we reluctantly headed inside the bright, gleaming building, taking last glances over our shoulders at the captivatingly moody scene on the other side of the glass.
Now, with late night Tokyo rapidly moving towards us, in spite of the view, I’m missing those breaths of fresh air. I idly adjust the cool air vent by my right knee and watch as the city—covering an area so massive that even from 38,000 feet it’s hard to take it all in without moving my eyes—takes on form, the shoreline of the bay and the edges of parkland solidifying as stark lines between light and dark. It’s just after midnight local time, but from up here, the view could be of a 6pm on a Friday night. With the pixelated glare of the ground lighting covering up all of the details that normally provide the hints of humanity—brake lights flooding the highways at rush hour, the lone light of a locomotive hauling a line of freight across a barren wilderness of darkness, or the red and blue strobe lights of a first responder heading to an emergency—there is no way to know.
A strong tailwind has been pushing us eastward since we left the Korean coast. Across the Sea of Japan and onward across the cloud-covered, rocky peaks of Gifu and Nagano prefectures, it has picked up in intensity—an invisible river that we are riding… flowing towards home. With the wind on our tail, we rapidly cross over Tokyo, its millions and millions of points of light sliding underneath us until they are all out of sight—the bright line of the coast the final thing to go. The only vestige that remains is the hint of a glow reflecting in the atmosphere around us. Soon that too fades, and the stars retake their rightful place in the night sky, while below them, the dark waters of the Pacific fill the bottom half of our visible world. In the far distance, a single red beacon light on a plane navigating the complex arrival into Tokyo drifts silently westward over the ocean—a small rubber ducky alone in the world’s biggest bathtub.
