What do John Madden, the late Isaac Asimov and I have in common? The three of us...and about 30 million other Americans...suffer from a phobia called "aerophobia" or fear of flying. Madden, a TV commentator for USA football games, travels coast to coast for different games on a bus or by train. He does not fly. The late Mr. Asimov (may he rest in peace) flew only two times in his entire life, and hardly ever left Boston where he lived. He did travel sometimes, by train, bus and ship. But in his adult life, as a famous science fiction writer who sent his characters across the Milky Way...he never flew in planes! Hey, me, too. But I got thrown in jail in Japan for 42 days and then deported for my phobia! Yes, it's an amazing story. Listen:
Background to a Phobia
Many people who heard of my story, including colleagues and coworkers, refused to believe that a phobia could really cause me to violate the Japanese immigration law (by being unable to fly out of the country in 1991 to get a proper work visa, as required by law). Some people said: "If you flew to Japan from America, you could certainly fly out of Japan to South Korea or Taiwan to get your work visa." Or: "Everybody knows that airlines are safe, much more safe than cars or trains. You used your fear of flying to stay in Japan illegally." Now what I want to explain on this webpage is that a severe fear of flying phobia is more powerful than most people can understand. To give you some background, read the following: I am a seasoned traveller. I have flown to over 25 countries, beginning in 1965, when I flew to France for a summer homestay program. I loved to fly. I never had any problems with flying. However, in 1983, I was a passenger in a DC-3 propeller plane that caught fire in the wilderness of Alaska on a fine summer day. The left engine caught fire and burned for 20 minutes. These 20 minutes were the worst 20 minutes of my life! You cannot really understand this unlesss you experience it! At any rate, after the pilot brought us down safely onto a gravel airstrip in Fairbanks, I kissed the ground and rejoiced that I was still alive. For the next 8 years, however, I could not bring myself to board an airplane. I tried. I made reservations for flights to New York, Mexico City, Hawaii, Seattle, but each time I made a reservation, I chicked out and called back the next day to cancel my ticket. I just could not fly. For 8 years. It was a debilitating phobia, attacking me with terrific anxiety even before I got on any planes. The best policy for me (I had no other choice) was to stop trying to fly. I took ferries and trains and buses when I needed to travel for business or pleasure. I put the whole idea of flying out of my life. Until...
That Fateful Day
One fine summer day in 1991, I met a wonderful Japanese woman named Nobuko Fujinoto, who was visiting Juneau for a few days with her friend Yoko Watanabe. It was one of those love at first sight things and full of this intense feeling, I decided that I must fly to Tokyo to be with Nobuko as soon as possible after she left. A month later, I was on a JAL jumbo jet from Anchorage to Tokyo! Me, the airplane phobic, the man who said he would never fly again, I did it! Yes, I did take a few valium pills in Juneau before the first leg of my journey began, and the pills worked wonderfully. I could fly! I was so happy to be normal again! But it was a combination of being love (that terrific feeling that can transform people's lives) and the tranquilizers that allowed me to board those two planes, one from Juneau to Anchorage and the jumbo jet to Tokyo. Both flights, in the same day, were wildly successful...for me, the phobic who said he would never fly. I flew and it was great. But I must stress that without my desire to get to Tokyo to be with the woman of my dreams and the powerful impact of the valium on my brain, I never could have done it. So I got to Tokyo. Then, guess what, Nobuko and I didn't work out as a couple, the bloom was off the rose, so to speak, and I found myself in a very interesting city with time on my hands. I decided to stay in Tokyo and look for a job. Using a connection I had a major newspaper in Tokyo, I found a job as a reporter/rewriter/editor at an English language daily and settled down to a new life! One problem, though. I entered Japan on a 90-day tourist visa that could not be renewed and after 90 days I was required to fly out of the country to get my proper working papers at a Japanese consulate overseas and then return to work in Tokyo. I knew this. My boss told me what I had to do and gave my the proper travel documents. However, I began panicking as the deadline approached. The phobia was still inside me, and I was not eager to fly again so soon after getting to Japan in the first place. I did call the Japanese immigration authorities and ask if there was a way I could get my work visa in Japan without having to leave the country, and I was told that in some cases, it was possible. Such as for medical emergencies or hardship cases. Hearing this, I felt I could qualify for some kind of medical waiver if I could find the right office to apply to. However, due to language problems and my embarrassment at having a phobia ("real men don't have phobias, they just grin and bear it"), I didn't tell my Japanese boss about my problem and after January 3, 1992, the deadline was over and I was an illegal alien, an illegal worker working for a major Japanese media firm. I didn't even confide in my American friends at the office; again, out of fear they would not understand and just laugh at me. (Exactly what happened 5 years later, when I was arrested, jailed and reported for the 1992 violation of Immigration Control Law Number xxx.) Let me tell you what it was like to live for 5 years as an illegal alien, without proper work papers, without a proper visa, always in fear of being "discovered" by the police or my employer. It was not a pretty picture. However, armed with the knowledge that I had broken the law, not out of criminal intention, but out of a medical problem, I felt that I could find a lawyer or immigration officer somewhere in Japan who would understand my situation and help bail me out. So I began a long, fruitless search for help for my dilemma, calling countless hotlines for foreigners, calling lawyers specializing in immigration and visa cases, hoping against hope that I could find my way out of this mess. Alas, I never could find anyone to help me; everyone told me over the phone my case was hopeless. So I just kept on working, paid my taxes, enjoyed life in Tokyo (really enjoyed life in Tokyo!) and kept hoping that someone, somewhere, would understand. After all, Japan is a civilized country and the Japanese are a civilized people. Surely, they would understand how my fear of flying phobia prevented me from flying out of Japan to get a proper work visa. Oh, but why didn't I take a ferry out of Japan to South Korea in late 1991, before my tourist visa expired, as many foreigners do (it's called a "visa run"). Good question...
And the Answer Is This
At the time, I was not really familiar with other ways of getting out of Japan. I did make some phone calls to find out if there was a ferry from Tokyo to Taiwan or Russia or South Korea, but I was told there were no ships at that time of year (winter). I put all my hopes in working out a deal with the Immigration department that would take my phobia into consideration. I had heard of a foreigner who claimed hardship (he had little money) and the Immigration people in Tokyo allowed him to stay in Japan without leaving the country, requiring him to report to Immigration two times a year instead of once. So you see, it is possible, in case-by-case Japan, to stay in the country. A colleague at work, an American, also did not have to leave Japan to get her work visa. She rushed to the Yokohama Immigration Office on the last day of her valid visa and they allowed her to stay and get her work visa stamped into her passport in Yokohama. Knowing these events, I felt I could qualify and that's how I played my cards, up until the day I finally missed the deadline and was told on the phone by Immigration authorities that "there is nothing that can be done, it is too late, you have overstayed." All this happened around the year-end holiday period when Japan takes a long holiday. At any rate, why didn't I take the ferry from southern Japan to Pusan, South Korea? In retrospect, that would have been the best way to go. But I played my cards in Tokyo, hoping for good results there. In the end, I hit a brick wall (and the language barrier didn't help matters much) and missed the deadline on January 3, 1992. I was an overstay, an illegal alien; not out of criminal intent, just a lingering phobia that wouldn't go away. I really tried my best to get my working papers processed in Tokyo, but being a newcomer to Japan, I didn't know how to play the game and fell into the cracks. In all my years of travel in Europe and South America, this had never happened to me before. But I was not really worried: in a way, not having to fly again was my main concern and after the deadline passed, I felt so "relieved" -- ah, I didn't have to fly after all! For a phobic, this is bliss! I was happy, delighted, calm. Listen to this: "The reaction to avoid flying is a common one," writes a phobia specialist. "People who are phobic develop intense feelings of fear and distress in situations that pose no real danger to them. The feelings become so overwhelming that they avoid the situation completely." Exactly! This is exactly what happened to me in Japan in the early days on January 1992, when all my legal troubles really began. At the time, I didn't care; I was more intent on avoiding having to fly again so soon after making my first flight in 8 years just 3 months earlier. Now, you might be wondering, what exactly is my phobia all about? What am I afraid of: flying? enclosed spaces? dying? Another good question. Let me explain:
On a Wing and a Prayer
On June 23, 1983, I was a passenger aboard a DC-3 that caught fire in midair above a mountain range in Alaska. I never suffered from a flying phobia before, although like all flyers I had seen my share of turbulent flights and flying through thunderstorms. But when I stared death in the face for 20 minutes on that fine June afternoon while the left engine burned ferociously and the pilot announced on the intercom "ladies and gentlemen, we have a major problem and we are going to try to crash land in the mountains below. Please put your heads down on your knees and prepare for a crash" I developed the seeds of this phobia. I "know" that airplanes are safe, I know I will never have such an experience again, but what keeps my on edge, what feeds my phobia, even 14 years later, is the MEMORY of what happened during those 20 terrifying minutes! If I could erase that memory, I could be a normal flyer again. But the memory is so intense, so deep, it is not easy to erase. But as time goes by, I am learning to fly again. I flew from Tokyo to Guam on September 13, 1996 (the day I was deported from Japan in handcuffs after spending 51 days in jail for violating the Japanese Immigration Law in 1992. I flew from Guam to Taiwan on November 11, 1996, after recuperating in Guam for two months. Both flights, like my 1991 flight to Tokyo from Alaska, were taken with valium in my bloodstream; heavily sedated I can fly. I am using the valium only when I fly and I will continue to use it until I can "rewire" my brain cells to slowly and quietly erase those terrible memories that lie deep within. So as I write this homepage on the World Wide Web, I am back in Japan again (after a one-year ban after being deported) and I flew here successfully from Taiwan, again using valium to help get through it all. I have no bitterness, no anger, no regrets; what happened to me in the Japanese justice system should not have happened to a phobic who violated the law due to a medical condition, but the Japanese are not yet "current" about phobias. The system there just treated me as a number, to be arrested, indicted, jailed and finally deported. It was a terrible way to treat a man who is phobic, putting him in a solitary cell for 42 days and treating him like a criminal! But now that I am back in Japan, I hope to help educate the Japanese about such situations, so that they don't occur in the future. Most important of all, I am slowly getting better, slowly letting go of my phobia, slowly recovering from that fateful day in June 1983 when I stared out a plane window at a burning engine and thought: "Oh my God! This can't be happening. I'm too young to die!" Miraculously (and credit the pilot of the DC-3 for getting us down alive on a gravel runway in Fairbanks after the fire went out). I have always embraced life with passion and I still do. I love life! I live this world! I just hope that what happened to me should never happen to you. NOTE: Anyone interested in reading more about my experience in jail can go to http://www.smn.com:80/response/revue/jailed.html and get the inside story, so to speak. For links to other sites that can help people deal with fear of flying phobias, you may email me at danbloom@reporters.net (I plan to ask the Japanese government to overturn my conviction -- I am currently a convicted felon, with a 1.5 year jail sentence suspended for 3 years -- and to apologize to me for treating me in such an inhumane way in the summer of 1996. The Japanese authorities should have allowed me to voluntarily repatriate myself to the USA without throwing me in jail for 6 weeks. I asked U.S. officials how they would treat a case like mine, and they told me I would have been allowed to leave the USA on my own, considering my medical condition and the reason why the violation of the law occurred. The Japanese justice system still has some catching up to do with the rest of the civilized world. Howver, as I said, I am not bitter, just bemused by it all, and I hope to help improve the justice and immigration system in Japan. It's a good country with good people; but they live under a very strict, narrow system that does not always bring out the best in people.
