Moving swiftly, Madam and I had hit the lead of the pack through the temperature check and I arrived at the Foreigners section of Immigration (there was a bevy of her compatriots following Madam to the Japanese passport section) to find there wasn't a queue at all.
Straight in, hand over passport and immigration form, place the index fingers on the fingerprint machine, get the facial recognition bit done and I was through something that mightn't have actually taken an hour last time around but certainly felt like it.
In fact, that process needed less time than I took to type that last paragraph.
Things didn't go quite so smoothly in the Baggage Claim area, since the baggage handling process doesn't seem to be class conscious, but once we'd done the retrieval and whisked our way through Customs we were on the lookout for the shuttle bus and looking pretty good.
I'm not sure exactly what happened next, but having been directed to the relevant stop (#6 if I recall correctly) I joined the queue with the bags and Madam headed off to get the tickets from the relevant machine. We'd checked our bags, the bus had arrived, and the driver had refused to accept what we wanted to hand over. Instead of two tickets and two receipts from the machine we had one ticket, the requisite number of receipts, and a driver who wanted actuals rather than apparent evidence.
There was some flustered to-ing and fro-ing that ended up costing an extra ¥2000, but we ended up on the bus at 8:35, a better result than we'd expected when we heard about flight delays back in Cairns.
Last time around I'd made a mental note to sit on the right hand side of the bus because it seemed the view of the city lights was better on that side, but this time, Madam's attempts to figure out what had gone wrong proved a significant distraction and I didn't see a lit-up Osaka Castle this time either.
The run along the freeway from the airport to downtown Kobe takes an hour, and we were in plenty of time to catch the 9:50 shuttle to the Okura and Meriken Park Oriental Hotels. Last time around we'd started at the Oriental, but this time it was the Okura for the first two nights.
Negotiations at reception proceeded with the regulation courtesies and rituals, and we were conducted to our room on the twenty-fifth floor by a bellhop who wasn't anywhere near as over the top as the Harry Houdini clone we'd encountered at the Oriental last time around.