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I’m back now from my brief trip to the United States. Overall, things went very well. I was pulled out of line at the airport at one point for a more thorough inspection (which did not exactly put to rest the anxiety described in my previous post), but fortunately I was armed with nothing more threatening than a necktie, so it was a relatively short ordeal.

US-VISIT should be “Do Not Visit US”
My Japanese colleague and I got off an ANA flight from Tokyo to Washington DC, a flight that you could reasonably expect would be populated with a large number of Japanese people—and it was. On the way to immigration, we saw countless posters for US-VISIT, the division of the Department of Homeland Security (an entity that did not exist the last time I was in the States, which was weird all by itself) charged with, among other things, “[Facilitating] legitimate travel and trade.” What would you guess was the ratio of US-VISIT personnel present to facilitate legitimate travellers to the number assigned to deal with American citizens (who were a distinct minority on this flight)?

It was 1:5. That’s right, there was one guy handling an entire flight full of Japanese, while five people helped the 30 or so Americans. Needless to say, it took a heck of a long time to get through the line. (Which was not the case, I should add, when we came back to Narita, where an equal number of immigration officers were available for citizen and non-citizen alike.) No wonder I found The Financial Times noting that the US may soften visa regime for business fliers.

They could start by not harassing my boss for not speaking English as well as I do.