Linkmeister

Memories of Japan

Here are some thirty-year old memories to share:

I lived in Japan from 1972-1974 as a 22-year old kid with two years of college behind him, at a time that was later called the "hollowing-out" of the military. I worked in the Naval Communications Station at Yokosuka, about 50 miles south of Tokyo. The majority of the people I worked with were not career Navy, but guys (and up until 1974, it was just guys) who had either been drafted or enlisted into the Navy to avoid the Army, and wanted nothing more than to get out ASAP. In fact, just having the college time was enough to annoy some of the people I worked with. Vietnam was winding down towards the final peace talks, but we were sending/receiving messages from ships off the coast in the war zone. We worked two day shifts, two mid-shifts, two swing shifts, and had 80 hours off. Then we started the whole process over again.

For the first eight or nine months I was there I lived on base; then moved to a ground-floor apartment in a three-story walkup, four apartments to the floor. The building was about one mile off base, with no hot water, no shower, a flush benjo, a single gas outlet for a burner, no heating or cooling, and a Japanese landlady who charged me 17,000 yen/month (at 300Y/dollar) and spoke no English to boot. There was a semi-western hotel right next door with reasonable prices for recognizable food, if I wanted a full meal off base. Cooking was a hassle for anything other than skillet foods (Hamburger Helper worked well). The apartment had a four-tatami living room, with one wall of shelved closets and a window opening into a half-above, half-below ground level space. Sleeping was in a two-tatami room separated from the living area by sliding paper doors. I had no furniture except a chest of drawers and a ton of stereo equipment, and a refrigerator for beer. If I wanted to bathe, I walked across the street to a fairly well-appointed bathhouse (only gaijin in the place, ever!), or I went on base and used the showers at the gym or in the barracks.

I walked to the base at first, then bought a little used Daihatsu and learned how to shift left-handed and drive on the left as well. This made life simpler; when I was walking I usually had to dodge about fifty or so Communist Party demonstrators at the main gate of the base in order to get to work. That's not a joke; there was nearly always some kind of disturbance going on there, either because of 'Nam or the homeporting of nuclear subs there, and later because the carrier Midway was homeported there as well.

Right outside the main gate was the usual array of clip joints, bars, and other assorted establishments catering to military personnel. You can find them in Rota, Spain; Agana, Guam; or at any base in the U.S. Pub crawls (to put a nice face on it) were a regular feature of life. That's where I learned to like fried rice, ramen, and gyoza.

Life there was sort of caught up with being on the job so much. By the time I got off the six-shifts-in-five-days routine the first twelve hours of the 80 off were spent sleeping. I spent a lot of time in the base library (such as it was) and a lot more reading books and listening to music in my apartment (record albums were $2.50 apiece at the Navy Exchange). I'd occasionally get on a train and go to Tokyo; I stopped to see the statue of Buddha at Kamakura once or twice. I didn't have much money to spend (as I recall, $119 every two weeks), and Tokyo was horrifically expensive even then ($50 for a fifth of Johnny Walker off base, and it seemed like most Japanese loved Scotch; how they could afford it was beyond me at the time). Foreigners in Yokosuka were automatically assumed to be Navy, and there was at least a perceived resentment on the part of the locals towards us.

The culture was so different; I felt reasonably mature and well-travelled; I'd lived in Puerto Rico, Guam, the East Coast of the U.S., the deep South (Charleston, S.C.), the West Coast in California, yet I didn't know what to make of the place. The crowding was unbelievable, yet nobody seemed to mind. The traffic was awful, yet the lights were obeyed. The men were polite to one another, yet they'd read semi-pornographic comic books on subways in full view of women. My monthly rent payment sessions were amusing, but my landlady and her family barely acknowledged my existence outside of those days.

I had mixed feelings about the country; I wouldn't trade the experience for anything, but I can't exactly say I enjoyed it, either. Had I been a little older and a little richer, I would undoubtedly have left a lot wiser than I did.

It's a fascinating place.

Posted by Linkmeister at April 20, 2002 03:39 PM