As Matt sat in his seat, he nervously began rooting through his (or, Kohei’s) duffel bag. He quickly found a wallet, which he opened and found a mere 500 yen in bills.
‘Wait, how did I know that’s not very much?’, Matt thought to himself, never having looked up the value of a yen before. More importantly, the English pounds that were also in his wallet confused him as he desperately tried to convert their value to yen, to no avail. Just as his language had shifted from English to Japanese without him realizing it, his cultural frame of reference was now slowly shifting eastward.
‘Passengers, we will soon be landing in Narita International Airport. Please fasten your seatbelts. We humbly apologize for any disturbance caused by the landing. Thank you.’
The stewardess from before spoke over the airplane’s intercom before switching to perfect, unaccented English to repeat her message. Matt focused on her words, trying to pick out their meaning.
‘Iin-ta… nasshun? Nasshunaru?', he mutters to himself. Try as he might, he was completely unable to connect the words he was hearing in English to any kind of meaning. He began to feel faint as he realized that his native language had been completely wiped from his mind.
Desperate for more information about what sort of situation he was being forced into, he resumed looking through Kohei’s wallet. How old was he? Where did he live? All of these questions would need to be answered if he was to have any hope of returning to his previous life.
‘Yatta!’ he muttered as he found the only other identification he could: A student ID card.
‘Let’s see here… Uchimura Kohei… Middle school grade 2... So, I must be about 13 or 14.’ He thought, before again becoming uncomfortable with the new knowledge filling his mind.
‘Gymnastics team… I guess I must be pretty good to be going to an international competition at my age… No, I mean Kohei must be good! I don’t know the first thing about gymnastics, damn it!’
A sudden thump pulled him out of his thoughts as the plane finally touched down and pulled to a stop at the terminal. Matt was surprised at how efficient and orderly the disebarkment from the plane was; each row of Japanese passengers quickly retrieved their things, slipped into the aisle and walked out. Not like those boorish westerners, who would always hold everyone up trying to force themselves to the front, Matt thought to himself as more and more Japanese attitudes slipped into his subconscious.
As Matt stepped out from the plane and into the terminal, he had the sudden thought to check his cell phone. He searched through his bag and found it, laughing to himself at the old-fashioned 2009-era flip phone, but also subconsciously aware that it was actually a very stylish model of phone in this time and place.
He turned the phone off of airplane mode, but it suddenly began to vibrate and play a snippet of a Japanese pop song. Matt was too surprised to do anything but flip his phone and answer the call from…