Things have changed since my first visit to Japan nearly 20 years ago, in November, 1989 — though I’m just beginning to see the differences, as my flight zooms above Hudson Bay in northern Ontario, taking the Arctic Circle route to the other side of the world. Thus far, the changes and differences are relatively minor; it will be interesting to see if they’re more significant once I arrive.

As I recall, my 1989 trip began with a non-stop flight from New York to Tokyo on a roomy, comfortable Boeing 747; this trip is on an even roomier, more comfortable 777. This flight will last 13 hours and 20 minutes; that may be a little faster than my 1989 flight, but it’s still a long, long time to spend on an airplane. But this time I’ve got one of those Bose sound-cancelling headphones, and it really makes a difference; listening to the roar of jet engines for 14 hours really does contribute to one’s jet-lag, and it will be interesting to see how much more quickly I recover, once I’ve arrived.

I vaguely recall bringing along some kind of primitive DOS-based laptop on my 1989 trip, which I used only for text entry; all of my other programs and data were on my desktop Mac back in my office (I don’t think the first laptop Mac had appeared at that point. Update: this article says that the Mac Portable was introduced on September 20, 1989. It weighed 15 pounds, and cost $7,300 with a hard drive. No wonder I stuck with a floppy-based DOS machine at the time!). And the laptop battery lasted for only an hour or two, which meant that it was essentially useless for most of the flight. This time, I’ve got my MacBook Pro, and for the first time I’m using the power-adapter doohickey that plugs into a DC power outlet in the airplane seat. I know this technology has been available for a few years, but not on domestic flights; I never remembered to order one prior to previous international flights, but the adapter comes as standard equipment with the current model of Apple laptops. What a luxury: I could keep my laptop running for the entire flight if I was so inclined. The guy sitting across the aisle from me is now watching his second movie on his adapter-powered laptop, so it must be a common experience.

On my 1989 trip, there was no way to communicate via email with my U.S.-based family, friends, and business colleagues; and most of them didn’t have email anyway. There were no cell phones (well, maybe there were a few in Tokyo and Hong Kong, but we certainly didn’t have them in the U.S.). And there were no Internet connections in the hotel rooms, and no World Wide Web to surf. All of that has changed, of course, and the only thing I can’t do is send email and surf the Web while I’m in flight.

There was one quirk that I encountered when getting organized for this trip, which I’ll have to think about for my next visit to Japan. Because Japan has a telecommunications network that’s incompatible with the U.S. (and that’s not meant as a criticism; it would be just as appropriate to say that ours is incompatible with theirs), my BlackBerry won’t work on this trip, nor will the cell-phone service that normally runs on my BlackBerry. But my service provider, T-Mobile, has a reasonable service: they’ll rent you a Japan-compatible cell-phone, and all you have to do is transfer the SIM card from the U.S. phone to the Japanese phone. The advantage of this approach is that you can continue using the same phone number — so you don’t have to bother telling all of your friends, family, and business colleagues to call a strange, new number if they want to reach you while you’re away.

Since I’ve got one of the current-model BlackBerries that functions both as a phone and an e-mail/Web device, removing the SIM card means that all of my wireless communications capability is shut down. I suppose I should have dragged both devices all the way to Tokyo before switching the SIM card; but my briefcase was a little cramped for space, so I swapped the SIM card into the Japanese phone just before I left for the airport, and left the BlackBerry behind. But the Japanese phone doesn’t work in the U.S., so it meant that I was incommunicado from the time I got in the taxi, until I had checked in at the airport, gone through security, and settled down in the American Airlines Admiral’s Club for a cup of coffee before boarding my flight. At that point, I was connected again: the club has half a dozen public-access PC’s, free local phone calls, and a T-Mobile Wi-Fi network that I could use with both my laptop and my Palm Pilot.

None of this would have mattered to me when I was enroute to the airport in 1989; I was lucky if I could find a working pay-phone at the airport, and my most valuable possession was my AT&T telephone credit card. One of the great pleasures of business travel in those days was the fact that everyone knew you were incommunicado from the moment you left for your trip, until the moment you checked into your hotel at your destination; it provided a few quiet hours to relax or catch up on work. Now we’re connected almost all the time, wherever we are, and I have to admit that I felt slightly desperate for those 45 silent minutes that the taxi was navigating from Manhattan out to JFK airport.

It makes me wonder what kind of changes I should anticipate if I visit Japan again, 20 years from now. Presumably we’ll have Internet connectivity aboard all of our flights; the big question, I guess, is whether we’ll have supersonic flights in order to reduce the travel time in much the way the Concorde dramatically shortened the flying time from New York to London. I’d like to think that the whole world will be using a single wireless communications protocol; but since that’s more a matter of politics than technology, there’s a non-trivial chance that we’ll still be dealing with three or four different kinds of networks. Hopefully we’ll have phones that can switch automatically from one protocol to another; and I wouldn’t be surprised if the combination of phone/email/Web communication has been miniaturized and improved enough so that it’s all embedded in our eyeglasses — or perhaps surgically implanted into our eyeballs (a terrifying thought for someone like me, who can’t even stand the thought of contact lenses).

Well, so much for travel differences. It will be interesting to see what kind of technology, business, and social changes that I encounter in Tokyo. I’ll report back in another day or two, once I’ve had a chance to poke around and see what’s going on.