We got to the airport fairly easily. Our tickets were taken care of last night and the airline still had our checked bags, so all we had to do was get our boarding passes. Done! yay! Hey, look, we already know at least a third of these people, heh! Seeing as how we'd be in Japan by this point if the flight hadn't been so screwed up, I was trying to find anything to keep me enthused. Fear set in momentarily when boarding was delayed, but thankfully it was a single, brief delay and shortly we were on the plane and it was IN THE AIR.
I was surprised we went as far north was we did, up into Canada and along the Aleutian Islands. They played "The Talented Mr. Ripley" for the in-flight movie. We were quite close to the end when somehow the channels were switched and we got a different video feed. I pointed it out to a flight attendant, and they switched back. They realized they'd have to rewind it, but they rewound it almost to the beginning. They tried to fix it, but kept forwarding tiny amounts, ignoring the people telling them it needs to go forward quite a bit. Eventually they said they'd just stop trying and we'd have to watch the movie all over again. Jerks.
The flight ran about 18 hours or so as I recall. We left mid-morning from Chicago and arrived about 4pm or so in Tokyo. Guess what didn't arrive with us. The luggage! Hey, you're good! The Japanese staff were much better than the US staff, I have to say. They were extremely thoughtful and polite to us. The desk guy even called our hotel for us to let us know we were going to be late due to the luggage issue and to hold our reservations. We were all totally wiped out and none of us noticed that the Japanese calendars have Monday as the first column so we got our rail passes starting a day late. oops. :( We didn't know it yet, of course. We stumbled out and got a ticket for Tokyo on a subway line. I stared out of the window at a dismal, rainy and rapidly darkening day. I felt awful. I'd been wearing these clothes too long, I was tired, and I was feeling the pangs of being in a country where I could barely speak the langauge. All the same I was captivated by the rice fields and Japanese architecture I was able to view.
We ended up arriving at Shinjuku Station instead of getting off at Tokyo Station. It wasn't a problem because it was closer, but we had to pay a few extra yen to get out of the station. We managed to get a taxi fairly quickly in the crowds outside of the station. He quickly figured out where the Asia Center Japan was from the map we gave him and off we went. The room was actually not too bad. It was small by some standards, but for the price and location, it was great. We mostly just wanted to settle in and turned on the television sets and napped a bit. About 10pm we were told our luggage had showed up! yaaaayyyy!!!