30 Aug, 2011
We’re all terror suspects now – The Guardian
Every air passenger is treated with suspicion since 9/11, regardless of appearance. Global traveller Pico Iyer has had to put up with it all his life.
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I’m sitting in the expansive spaces of Renzo Piano’s four-storey airport outside Osaka, sipping an Awake tea from Starbucks and waiting for my bus home. I’ve chosen to live in Japan for the past 20 years, and I know its rites as I know the way I need tea when feeling displaced, or to head for a righthand window seat as soon as I enter a bus. A small, round-faced Japanese man in his early 30s, accompanied by a tall and somewhat cadaverous man of the same age, approaches me.
“Excuse me,” says the small, friendly seeming one; they look like newborn salarymen in their not-quite-perfect suits. “May I see your passport?”
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