You could call it a stretch, comparing my 19-week-old son to Bill Murray – despite the fact that newborns often resemble old wrinkled men (sorry, Bill!) – but when it came to this particular Sofia Coppola-inspired analogy, my husband had a point. Back in May, he compared the relationship between Murray and Scarlett Johansson in 2003’s Lost in Translation – late night Tokyo companions, up-in-the-clouds hotel buddies, partners in existentialist angst – to my own relationship with our baby, Larry. This made me the pink-wig-wearing Johansson, and Larry, if you swap whisky for breast milk, the significantly more diminutive Murray. My hubby, much to his marital discredit, was Johansson’s barely-seen partner John, who frequently disappears on assignment, leaving his significant other alone at Tokyo’s iconic Park Hyatt Hotel to hang out with Murray/Larry.
Long analogy short: my architect husband had to travel to Japan for work. I had two choices: stay in Walthamstow for two weeks, alone with said baby, or follow my husband to Tokyo and Kyoto, Larry in tow.
“It’s the best time to travel!” friends with toddlers insisted. “Larry won’t be eating, crawling or walking!” “Breastfeeding is a breeze on holiday!” “Do it NOW!” A 19-week-old baby did sound like the sweet spot for long-haul travel… pre-weaning or bottle feeding, pre-toddler tantrums and mid-air meltdowns, pre-the slow-dawning realisation that you can’t actually relax on holiday ever again.
If you’re also considering getting lost in translation lactation, here’s my honest guide to travelling Japan with a newborn.
The attitude
With a baby, life quickly becomes a matter of expectation vs reality. I imagined grand adventures in Japan. In Tokyo: raucous solo evenings in Shibuya’s Drunken Alley once the baby was in bed, and oodles of vintage treasure hunting. From Kyoto: a day trip to nearby Nara, where Bambi-like deer roam the streets. In reality, I ended up exploring places that were maximum a 30-minute walk or a short taxi ride from my hotel, to allow for emergency nappy changes or impromptu meltdowns. But the joy of doing this in Japan is that the mundane really is magical, whether you are ordering a morning coffee, sampling futuristic refreshments from a vending machine (honestly!), walking to a shrine, or simply looking upwards at the seemingly unending towers that populate Tokyo’s skyline.
The flight
Ah, those elusive British Airways Avios points. The ones you squirrel away for decades, stockpiling for a rainy day when you can blow them all on, say, business class return flights to Japan for you and your small family. Think again! Despite having several hundred thousand points, our air mile redemption options were laughable, and given my fairly meagre maternity leave budget, we settled on KLM economy flights via Amsterdam. Ok, with a baby in tow, you don’t really want to make your journey longer with an indirect flight, but we figured the short 45-minute hop from City Airport to Schiphol would be a good testing ground for how Larry might fare on the next, significantly longer leg. (Reader: he slept the whole way!)
AloJapan.com