My transit some three months back in February through Haneda Airport, from Bangkok and then on to the United States, was already a bit eerie as the novel coronavirus slowly made its presence known. Re-routed flights and limits on face mask purchases at Haneda’s airport shops were early hints of the world we now find ourselves in.
I was en route from Southeast Asia — where I am based with the Milken Institute — onward to Mississippi and then New York City for memorial services for Harold Burson, the late founder of the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, with which I had once worked in Tokyo.
Over 30 years, Burson had become a longtime friend and mentor and been rightly described by PRWeek magazine as “the [20th] century’s most influentional PR figure.” When he passed away from complications from a fall, Burson at 98-years-old had seen over the course of his lifetime the start and end of both a world war and a polio epidemic, and the arrival of then-modern technologies that are modern no more, from the color television to the Sony Walkman.