Kenji Watanabe
Eleven years as an ANA gate agent at Tokyo Haneda. Now writes from Yokohama. Specialises in HND operational reality and Asian hub design.
Kenji spent eleven years at All Nippon Airways as a gate agent at HND, almost all of it at T2 working the morning long-haul wave to North America and Europe. He left in 2023 to write and to teach part-time at a hospitality programme in Yokohama, where he lives.
He writes for airport.flights as a paid freelance contributor, two pieces a month focused on HND operational reality, the broader Asian hub design philosophy, and the small differences between airports that look identical from the seat-map. His beat is the airport from the gate-agent side, written for an audience that has only seen it from the boarding queue.
He lives in Yokohama, commutes to Tokyo more than he’d prefer, and remains the rare ANA loyalist who will openly admit that JAL’s First Class lounge at HND is slightly better than his own employer’s equivalent. He thinks it’s important to be honest about these things.