We are awake by 6:00 AM, content to have accumulated 9+ hours of sleep between last night's early turn-in and Megan's eventual insistence that we get up to feed her and watch her maniacally smash a plastic giraffe into a plastic rhinoceros. Breakfast is more eggs and toast, same as dinner last night. [If we were to leave Japan right now and go home - not an option, as I understand the situation - my prevailing memory from our time in Misawa would be that we ate a bunch of eggs. That is eight gone in our first six waking hours. Just crushing them.] Kristen leaves for the hospital before 7:00, and Megan and I spend the morning settling in to our temporary home.
Last night was the first of 29 scheduled nights in room #1217 of the Misawa Inn, the on-base military-run lodging facility that exists to accommodate short-term displacements like ours. The second-floor walk-up more closely resembles a small furnished apartment than a typical hotel room, with separate living and sleeping areas, plus a full kitchen. Furnishings include a couch, a large armchair, a lamp shaped like a horse, a second lamp painted in a scheme that someone browsing Pier 1 might vaguely describe as "kind of Japanese-looking," a surprisingly excellent bed, wall-to-wall Berber, a shockingly loud toilet, three large ceiling-mounted fluorescent light fixtures that each seem capable of illuminating one full quadrant of a soccer field, way too many empty shelves (I count 12), a microwave, an electric range, five decent pots and one awful skillet, a complimentary tiny bottle of dish soap, and one of those horrible single-serving disposable-tray hotel room coffee makers that yields four ounces of translucent water, surely devised as some sort of children's toy instead of a proper Caffeine Delivery System for an adult human. There is also a single freestanding tower-style fan, sheepishly sitting in the corner of the bedroom, as if embarrassed that it was the only one sent here to contend with this wall full of west-facing windows in a building with no air conditioning.
We have "moved in," if that is an appropriate description of the five minutes spent hanging our shirts in the closet and plugging in the laptop. I suspect that one month will be an awkward amount of time to live in a place. Either way too short or way too long, depending on how we approach it - stocking a pantry to cook vs. cereal and take-out, developing actual hobbies vs. killing evenings with miniature golf and bad movies, full-size toothpaste vs. travel-size toothpaste. The differences between a very short move and a very long trip, I suppose. Our light packing will surely remind us that it is the latter; in hopes of remaining nimble enough to navigate airports and train stations without a pack animal, we are traveling with precisely four days worth of clothing per person, a scheme perilously dependent on being able to launder everything we have twice a week. I can foresee no regrettable outcomes to this plan.
The room's coffee table has been upended and jammed against the desk to make way for a Pack 'n Play that we borrowed from the front desk. Megan slept in it for a few hours before an agitated 2:00 AM request for alternate accommodations, which was likely for the best, as we are now confident to confirm yesterday's suspicions that the Pack 'n Play is the source of an odor that I have imprecisely declared to be that of a wet dog but is probably just that of a Pack 'n Play that has spent several months in a hotel closet. We return it and decline a replacement, electing to instead just fix her up a little spot in the corner of the room with the extra duvet from the closet, which should be just fine until she learns how to crawl.
AT&T's brochure of international roaming packages is a terrifying list of very large numbers printed next to very small ones, so we will attempt to survive the next 5+ weeks with no cell phone service. If I am not mistaken, no human has done this since 2006. Kristen will spend each day sitting next to a phone and a computer in her office, but all of my communication with her and the rest of the world will rely only on the hotel room's phone line or an internet connection. [Given the scarce public wifi on and off base, I expect to endure all of my time outside of our room fully disconnected from modern electronic society, a neo-Luddite vagrant, aimlessly pushing a stroller through a foreign country while fumbling with a map made out of paper, of all things, with no access to my current GPS coordinates or Yelp reviews of places that look like they might be noodle restaurants.] The room phone rings at 10:00, obliterating nap time with one of those impossibly loud electronic ooo-WEEE-ooo-WEEE-ooo-WEEE-ooos that all off-white hotel landlines of a certain vintage make; I spend one deafening ring considering whether it might be a welcome call from the base commander, or the front desk offering condolences for porta-crib stench, but it is Kristen, confirming that she will be done for the day at lunchtime. She has spent the morning in-processing and getting acquainted with her new coworkers, but the clinic is closed to patients today. When she returns a few hours later, we decide to use the free afternoon for a walk through the city just beyond the base gate.
Misawa is in rural northern Japan, a location known to elicit an audible groan when one looks it up while really hoping that it will be near Tokyo. It is near the northern tip of Japan’s main island, which is shaped like a boomerang or a dog-legged fairway, or maybe a “J” if you are desperately cramming for a geography quiz and willing to squint a little. It is near the coast, as cities on archipelagos tend to be, occupying the south edge of a three-mile wide strip of land sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and Lake Ogawara. By population, it is the 7th-largest city in Aomori Prefecture, which is the 31st-largest of the nation's 47 prefectures (the Japanese equivalent of states or provinces, I gather). That is one clumsy way to suggest that Misawa is not a large city, which it is not - only about 40,000 people live here, excluding the U.S. military.
We load Megan into the stroller and walk out through the main gate, our first experience of literally stepping over the line separating the base - which, so far, feels identical to every U.S. military facility that I have ever visited - from our very foreign surroundings. The transition is abrupt: Just beyond the gate is a modest Japanese city going about its Japanese business as an economic (mini-)hub for the surrounding rice and strawberry farms; just inside of the gate is a squadron of F-16 jets and a Cinnabon. But a few shops and restaurants just off base try to blur the line, mostly operated by Japanese locals and wooing Americans either by serving approximated tastes of home (Mike's Tex Mex Restaurant, a bar called My Place, a pizzeria, and a Hawaiian-style rotisserie chicken stand) or offering American-friendly local services (barber shops, car insurance agencies, etc.).
There is a surprisingly great liquor store in this area, with hundreds of varieties of sake (about which I currently know nothing but hope to learn while we're here) and an excellent selection of Scotch, Japanese whiskies and Belgian and German beers. [I need to stop thinking of places like this as "surprisingly" great, especially while in a foreign country with an ancient drinking culture about which I know not nearly enough to justify any preconceptions. Much of the world has spent centuries concocting delicious booze while the U.S. has been busy with prohibition and an embarrassing ongoing Light v. Lite debate. We are clearly a bit behind the curve here, so I should probably rein in whatever misguided elitism I feel just for being savvy enough to know about some "obscure" European beer that has only been in continuous commercial production for like six hundred years.] I buy a few things to try, including a small bottle of Suntory Yamazaki 12-year single malt whisky, a well-regarded Japanese offering. Japanese whisky seems to be recently trendy in the U.S., but Suntory is not new at this - it started as a winery in 1899 and has been distilling whisky since 1923. Today, Suntory is a huge international conglomerate of beverage brands (one of its subsidiaries is a regional U.S. manufacturer & distributor of Pepsi, another is the exclusive seller of Snapple in Europe), and the company maintains an especially visible presence in Japan via its bright blue BOSS Coffee vending machines, which so far appear to be laid out in an intricate grid such that no Japanese person is ever more than 200 feet away from a selection of ¥120 canned lattes. Suntory is also the brand of whisky that Bill Murray's character is shilling in Lost in Translation, in which Murray plays a well-known American movie star discreetly moonlighting in a Japanese advertising campaign. These circumstances are surely familiar to Tommy Lee Jones, whose face is currently plastered all over these machines. [Judging by some of his expressions in the ads, I suspect that this scene might particularly resonate.]
Anchoring this whole Yank-pandering district is a big U.S.A.-themed novelty shop/grocery store called "Sky Plaza Misawa," or possibly "America in Misawa," or maybe those are two different places (the signs are confusing). The novelties side is full of knick-knacks branded with iconic dead Americans (James Dean, Frank Sinatra, etc.), plus some "As Seen on TV"-sorts of gadgets, an assortment of coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets that do not like Mondays, and a display with like six different models of Radio Flyer wagons. The other side is presumably meant to replicate the non-perishables section of an American grocery store, offering a few familiar jars and cans and snacks and candies that I have not yet seen elsewhere, plus a huge display with something called "Krazy Mixed-Up Salt Steak-Flavored Doritos," which are sold in the sort of huge bag usually reserved for large-breed dog food and are so comically American-sounding that I am sort of offended that they are not available in America. In the back of the store is a snack bar called "Jack & Betty," with a menu of nachos, soft pretzels, "HOT DOG BIG SIZE," and several other similar items that one could imagine eating while driving away from a gas station; the counter is decorated like a diner and has a sign featuring a cartoon of Elvis Pressley dancing on top of a muscle car, flanked on one side by Marilyn Monroe and on the other by King Kong holding an American flag. It is unclear whether this whole place is an earnest but misinformed attempt to recreate an authentic American shopping experience or a mindful over-the-top caricature of one, but either way, it seems to be your best bet around here if you need a metal sign with a picture of John Wayne on it.
Crossing the street and starting down what looks like a main road, the storefronts' English grows sparser and less articulate, with "Tubes Restaurant and Bar Ganjha Surf" giving way to something called "You's bldg.", then "BEER: STEAK LIQUOR COW BEER," until eventually all of the signs are just Japanese writing with smiling cartoon animals. We walk a loop around a park in the center of town, across the street from the prominent five-story city hall building. A giant banner draped on its facade is the first of many references we see to "Miss Veedol," a bright red single-engine prop plane that was flown by two Americans from here to Washington in 1931 - the world's first successful nonstop trans-Pacific flight. It is a bit of international aviation history that Misawa has embraced as a claim-to-not-quite-fame, appointing the plane itself as a sort of city mascot.
The rest of our ~1-mile walk takes us past a large civic center, a convenience store, the public library, a day care, a few residential blocks, and a produce market. The city is clean but visually different from the charming old farm town that I had imagined: dull grey mid-century urban architecture, exposed elevated utility lines cluttering every view, narrow streets with few sidewalks, eerie alleys and unmarked doors opening almost directly onto the edges of the roads. Many storefronts are hidden by roll-down metal security doors. There are remarkably few people on the streets, even for mid-afternoon, and everything seems to be closed. It is the sort of landscape that, if encountered in a big American city, might urge one to double-check that the car doors are locked.
But it does not feel dangerous, and the overwhelming consensus when talking to people on base is that crime is all but nonexistent here. The exceptions, they say, usually involve American airmen getting themselves into trouble outside the gate, and it occurs to me that perhaps I don't feel threatened because I am more closely associated with the guys prompting the door-locking than the people locking their doors. Even though Misawa is a joint American/Japanese base and the countries' relationship these days is generally friendly, the locals may very well view the U.S. as outright occupiers - we are parading fighter jets through the sky at all hours of the day while forcibly chilling on their lakefront property, after all. Throw in a standing threat of a drunk soldier wandering into your backyard and making a scene (or something much, much worse), and I suppose the whole American presence here could be intimidating and tiresome. As we walk, I wonder whether even this innocent afternoon stroll on their turf might somehow come off as arrogant or somehow contribute to whatever latent international fear-mongering is going on, although that seems like an unlikely thing to take away from seeing a couple of white people sheepishly singing "The Wheels On The Bus" to a baby wearing sunglasses.
We reenter the gate, passing one of the base day care centers on the walk back to the Inn. It is outdoor playtime for the toddlers, who are staggering on barely-functional legs in random directions through the fenced-in grass yard. The sight of Megan passing just beyond the fence brings some unsettling order to the scene, as two dozen erratically wobbling toddler bodies simultaneously reorient themselves to instead lurch directly toward us. It is a bit creepy. Megan thinks it is awesome.
Tuesday, 18 June 2013
The clinic is again closed today, so Kristen has another morning of desk-organizing and face-showing but very little actual doctoring. (Regular office hours resume on Thursday.) One might be tempted to question the cost/benefit particulars of displacing a doctor from her own busy clinic and flying her 3000 miles to spend the first full 1/8th of her scheduled working days doing almost nothing useful, but given the military's preference for issuing "Orders" as opposed to, say, "Topics for Debate," one is probably better off not articulating these sorts of things to himself.
The clinic closure is in deference to Day 2 of an ongoing 72-hour base-wide "exercise," one of the big training drills that happen regularly on all military bases. I know very little about exercises, except that many of them appear to center around the simulation of some all-hell-breaking-loose sort of deal (Kristen participates in the medical ones, one of which involved spending several hours locked in a room pretend-diagnosing people who were pretending to suffer from pretend botulism), and I know nothing about this particular one, except that orange cones are scattered on the sidewalks, the TV is constantly informing me that the bowling alley is closed, and the outdoor PA system periodically fires up with a guy yelling "EXERCISE, EXERCISE, EXERCISE: Code Something-Or-Other," or whatever. I think all of the airmen might also be carrying around more stuff than usual (large guns and gas masks and such), although I have not yet been able to confirm that this is not just part of one's standard daily routine when working on a U.S. military base within range of Pyongyang, in which case I should perhaps be a bit more nervous to be here than I am.
I hesitate to share any more observations for fear of inadvertently WikiLeaking something, although I likely need not be concerned since a simple Google search turns up a bunch of military-penned propagandist news articles about past exercises; regardless, every time I leave the hotel room and see something happening, I feel as if I have stumbled upon another CD full of Highly Classified Shit. I will say only that the whole production appears to be quite grand, and that the personnel actively participating seem accustomed to and almost bored by the routine of it, which I suppose is the idea.
As a visitor, Kristen has no role in the exercise, so we are free to take another walk, this time around the base itself. It is not large, as bases go - the common area (the non-mission part that people like me have any business being on) is less than a mile across, and is fully walkable. There should be enough here to keep us busy for a month: A library, a fitness center, the bowling alley (which will presumably be opening at some point), an indoor swimming pool, half-a-dozen restaurants, an indoor recreation facility with miniature golf and batting cages and a big playground for kids, a movie theater, and the Commissary/Exchange mall complex, the standard-issue grocery store/department store/food court that is precisely replicated on every military base. We browse the Exchange for a few minutes and pick up a few necessities, including a 4-cup coffee maker for a well-spent $13.
At the end of this shopping center is a storefront advertising a car rental service, and we stop in to ask about a reservation for the weekend. The small office inside is shared by two separate outfits, one that rents cars and one that sells them, with a center aisle separating two desks that are manned by two outlandishly different men. On the left is someone called "Harley Bill." (We find this out later. He is a bit of a local celebrity.) He is an American man, maybe 50 years old, whose wardrobe and office decor are such that you could probably guess his name in three tries, and your first two guesses would be "Harley Bob" and "Harley Mike." He appears to be quite fond of a specific brand of motorcycle. He spins in his chair, greeting us and asking if we are interested in buying or renting. Renting, it turns out, is not the correct answer if one wishes to hang out with Harley Bill - he is here to sell you reliable pre-owned vehicles, and also to spend many hours every day looking at pictures of sweet Hogs on the internet (probably). Instead, he directs us to turn 180 degrees to speak with his exact opposite, a man whose name I did not catch but whom I will refer to as Mitsubishi Ken: a young Japanese gentleman with a permanent nervous smile and a mop of black hair swept to one side, wearing a shirt and tie with an ill-fitting brown sport coat that looks like it would offer, like, literally zero protection against road rash. He speaks limited English but is helpful, offering a brochure of rental rates and informing us that we need to first acquire something called a "4EJ" military driver's license before we can legally drive on base and proceed any further with renting, but I spend the whole conversation distracted and daydreaming about how these two guys must keep each other company during slow days at the office. I imagine that it mostly involves Harley Bill browsing eBay and excitedly turning his monitor around every five minutes to make the poor Japanese guy look at another badass paint job.
Wednesday, 19 June 2013
This morning, AFN Sports is airing an NBA Finals game, shown live at its 10:00 AM local tip-off. AFN Sports is one of eight channels offered on the American Forces Network, the U.S. military's worldwide radio and television feed that makes up the bulk our hotel's reasonable TV offerings - the only other options are a few local Japanese feeds, which are fascinating but mostly incomprehensible, and several channels cycling through a series of informational PowerPoint slides, a vital 24/7 base communications resource that one can always check for up-to-the-minute bulletins clarifying which night is Western Night at the Misawa Club and whether or not you should wear your seat belt when you are in a car (you should, it says). AFN TV aggregates programming from a bunch of U.S. networks, mostly broadcasting current episodes of all sorts of shows, either live or at just enough of a delay so that they come on at a sensible local time - new episodes of The Daily Show, for example, air in local prime time, some 10 hours after they aired on the East Coast, and Good Morning America is on live at 9:00 PM. A few live sporting events are also shown every morning, which mostly means baseball at this time of year, but also the NBA and NHL playoffs.
As a government entity, the broadcasts strive to avoid any suggestion of endorsement, often doing so in amusingly overt ways, such as the equal-time bipolar rage-parade that plays out every evening on AFN News as a single channel alternates between Fox News and MSNBC talking heads for four hours. This also means that no standard TV commercials are aired; instead, each commercial block is filled with a series of 30-second PSA-style spots, produced by AFN and highlighting various military points of emphasis. (Those videos were all uploaded in 2007, but the current batch features all of the same messages and similar production quality.) I have only recently realized that a certain one of these is advocating "traits of a resilient airman," not "traits of a Brazilian airman," as I had misheard it the first several times, which, with no disrespect intended for the fine aviators of Força Aérea Brasileira, seemed like a curious standard.
To acquire the 4EJ license required to drive a car on and off base, one must first complete the base's driver safety class and written exam that are offered every Wednesday at the Officers' Club. Kristen and I both intend to get one, so Megan and I leave for the hospital and catch the last few minutes of the game in the waiting area while we wait for Kristen, who finishes up for the morning before joining us for lunch and the 15-minute walk to the Club.
The ball room hosting today's class is outfitted with a dozen round banquet tables, and we park Megan between two chairs at the one nearest to the room's back exit. I estimate 40-50 attendees, mostly young uniformed active duty-types, but also several spouses and at least four other children, including one baby who looks to be a little younger than Megan. Our instructor this afternoon is a Japanese man who begins by apologizing for his English, telling us that he learned it almost entirely by watching "a lot of deeeeeeee Veeeeee DEEEE MOVIES," which he says in a hilarious way - intense, crescendoing and accelerating through the words, but with a still face - but nobody is quite sure whether to laugh since he only started talking ten seconds ago and it is unclear whether he is trying to be funny or this is just the way that he talks (a little of both, I think). He tells us that there will be a test, that all test questions will be specifically addressed during the class, and that he will warn us exactly when he is about to talk about something that will be a test question so that we can write it down. It seems that this will primarily be an exercise in deciphering and transcribing the words of a man who learned our language by watching Die Hard a bunch of times in a row.
Kristen quickly decides that she has some work left to do at the clinic (she has been tending to some of the urgent-care walk-in patients) and that this is not for her, leaving Megan and me to finish the class. The presentation turns out to be quite good, a useful one-hour summary of Misawa- and Japan-specific details that make driving here significantly different. This mostly consists of things related to being on the left side of the road, plus an overview of international traffic signage and some notable differences in the rules and customs of on- vs. off-base driving. (The instructor oddly emphasizes the lack of any Japanese law requiring that one yield to an unloading school bus, as if he really doesn't want us to miss out on the chance to whiz right by some poor Japanese kids trying to cross the street.) There is also a lot of discussion about winter conditions - although difficult to envision amidst June's humid swelter, Misawa apparently averages over 120 inches of snow in the winter, with an all-time recorded high of twice that. The instructor notes that snow tires are required on all cars because snow is not reliably removed from the roads and is instead just left to pile up; this sounds like a terrible plan considering the narrow streets in town and all of the tiny cars I see driving around here, but I'm just a delicate snowbird who summers here and retreats to Anchorage's mild 75-inch annual snowfalls, so what do I know?
When the Japanese guy finishes teaching the useful stuff, eight uniformed military folks march into the room for the mind-numbing administrative portion of the festivities, with boxes of paperwork and a much less interesting presentation about automobile registration and insurance requirements, capped with a dogged browbeating re: consequences of DUI. Forms are then distributed and filled out as a group via a 10-minute line-by-line instructor-led walk-through, a horrendous task that eventually puts Megan over the edge and has her writhing and moaning in boredom in a way that only societal pressures prevent me from replicating. A few trips to the lobby calm her enough for me to get through the test, which is not quite as straightforward as advertised but easy enough to pass while simultaneously wrangling a hungry ten-month-old who is finally acting like a ten-month-old. A line forms at the back of the room, where the class administrators are sitting in a row, reviewing each applicant's materials and issuing licenses on the spot; I approach and proceed through the verification process right up to the final approval - like, I literally watch the woman draw back her approval-stamping arm and then halt the forward motion, mid-stamp, like some stupid movie scene - at which point the "ARRIVAL DATE"/"EXPECTED DEPARTURE DATE" section of my application is questioned. The Paperwork Brigade confers and their leader informs me that this driver's license is in fact only available to people who will be in Misawa for at least three months. That seems like a top-of-the-decision-tree sort of condition that one might consider putting on a website, or maybe announcing at the beginning of the class, or perhaps it could just be the sort of thing that one is willing to overlook once the stamp gets within 4" of justifying the attendance of this annoyed baby who has been interrupting class for the last 45 minutes. The woman is nice enough to tell me that I am instead eligible for an entirely different short-term driver's license that can be attained only by coordinating with some separate military agency before we leave Alaska, which seems like it already happened. I persist with my legendary tenacity, first saying, "Oh. Really?" and hoping for a different answer, and then demonstratively sulking back to my chair, figuring that the one thing sure to persuade this person to let compassion and common sense prevail over the rigorous administrative regulations of her government employer is the sight of a 32-year-old man despondently packing a diaper bag and pouting because he walked all the way over here and missed Jeopardy! for nothing. This, it turns out, does not work.
So we will not be obtaining driver's licenses, and any driving we might do in Japan will be done by pairing the devil-may-care recklessness of deliberate unlicensed vehicle operation with an exhaustive academic understanding of the precise conditions for which a left turn is permitted on a red light. Maybe we can slip Harley Bill a twenty and get him to strong-arm Mitsubishi Ken into renting us something under the table, I guess.
Thursday, 20 June 2013
Megan and I are still in the room at 11:00 AM when the housekeepers knock on our door. They are a crew of three Japanese women, the same ones that I have seen in the halls of the building but not yet crossed paths with in our room. All three look nervous and embarrassed to encounter a real live person, which is an impeccable manifestation of a stereotype but also a pretty reasonable reaction, probably - the typical guest here is surely visiting base with a specific obligation to do something or be somewhere or meet with somebody, any of which would involve being showered and out of the room well before the sixth inning of this Braves-Mets game. At least one of the women speaks enough housekeeping-relevant English to ask whether they should come back later, but I ask them to please come in and take the trash, at least.
Megan is fascinated by these strangers rustling around in her space and breaking up the quiet of the morning, and the housekeepers appear to feel the same way about her. Personally, I am just glad that these multiple hotel employees have now visually confirmed that the third occupant in the room with Kristen and me is a human. For the last several months, we have successfully been working with Megan on some early potty training. At home, we have a tiny toilet seat-shaped plastic tub with which she has developed enough comfort and competence to effectively reduce the number and, uh, potency of unpleasant diaper changes. We decided that the seat was too big to pack, and our assumption that we could pick up something similar here turned out to be unreasonably optimistic unless embracing the loosest possible definition "something similar" - the best available option at the Exchange was a collapsible dog food bowl, which actually seems to work well enough for her and now resides in our bathroom. But with that, the "bed" in the corner of the room, and the Pack 'n Play that we returned due to an inexplicable "dog odor," I have been nervously awaiting management's completely reasonable accusation that we are in violation of the Inn's no-pet policy. I am considering picking up a leash and a bag of dog food to keep in the kitchen, just to keep everyone guessing.
I am again venturing outside of the gate today, intent to today acquire a vegetable that is less awful than the ones we have been enduring from the Commissary. Winters in Alaska motivate one to develop a considerable tolerance for terrible vegetables, but none quite as bad as Tuesday night's broccoli, which gave us a good idea of what it might be like to steam and eat an acoustic ceiling tile. Some local Japanese produce is available on base - potatoes, mostly, and some berries - but the bulk of it is labeled with the same California and Mexico stickers we see at home. Whatever goes on to get it from those places to here does not yield good results.
In addition to the odd themed store just off base, I am aware of at least three grocery stores in town. Each occupies a grocery store-sized building with grocery store-style window signage and generally bears exterior resemblance a grocery store I might encounter at home, but surely this is just the front end of a brutal bait-and-switch where I wander inside and then have to try to act cool while staring down 30 aisles of bean paste and mollusks. I skip these today in favor of the little market that we noticed during our walk on Monday. It is not far from the gate, but it is a locals' place: no English is posted or spoken, and the shrill, enthusiastic tourist version of "Irasshaimase!" that every shop employee yelled at us in Tokyo and on Monday's walk (a reflexive, seemingly mandatory customer greeting at all places of business - it means "Welcome" or "Come in," I gather) is replaced here by a skeptical delivery, trailing off as they get a look at me. It is clear that I do not resemble the usual clientele. (I should probably just get used to that.) But this is what I was hoping for - rows of plastic bins, full of spinach, a few types of lettuce, broccoli, strawberries, plums, and something that might be a squash, plus lots more with leaves and fruits that I cannot identify, which says as much about my own ignorance of plants beyond the few that I regularly eat as it does about the exoticism of the spread. I decide to start with some basics and come back to try some weird stuff if this first batch works out. The cashier still looks confused as we approach the counter to pay, but she takes my yen and gives us no trouble.
The walk home takes us past a windowless building, clad in yellow metal panels and leaking electronic BLOOPs and MEEPs from a wall full of ventilation louvers, primarily there to discharge what I estimate to be a blend of one part air mixed with eleven parts cigarette smoke. I assume that it is an arcade but learn later that it is a pachinko parlor, a casino where one may gamble only via variations of one specific pinball machine/slot machine hybrid game. Gambling is illegal in Japan, but there are tens of thousands of these parlors in the country, all sidestepping the law with a shady-sounding scheme whereby no cash is directly wagered or won. Instead, you buy a bunch of tiny metal balls, which are both the currency of the machine (instead of coins or tokens) and a physical element of the gameplay (like pinball), and when you are finished playing, you can exchange whatever balance of ball bearings you end up with for prizes. All of that sounds exactly like the cash-to-token-to-ticket-to-baseball cards workaround I used to blow my allowance on at the arcade, but the twist here is an option to select a special prize - often tokens, I think, or sometimes even just a particular recognizable variety of stuffed animal or candy bar - which an "unaffiliated" establishment next door is very interested in buying from you for a stack of cash, equivalent to your winnings. Clearly this last bit cannot be a legitimate legal circumvention - if it were, the same laundering would be done to legalize card games and sports betting and everything else. I gather that pachinko, specifically, benefits from a bizarre nationwide understanding that everybody will just look the other way about the part where the whole thing should probably be totally illegal. [Many suggest that Japan's Yakuza organized crime syndicate is or was previously involved in securing the parlors' and exchange desks' unencumbered operating privileges; the Wikipedia entry for "Gambling in Japan" instead vaguely cites only "historical, monetary, and cultural reasons," and the conspiratorially-minded are encouraged to speculate re: the Yakuza's interest in and proclivity for PR-sensitive Wikipedia scrubbing.] Strictly legal or not, the halls thrive, collectively profiting over $320 billion annually, which paints the picture of an addictive (and probably sort of depressing) game that manages to make the precisely calibrated churnings of an unwinnable metal box look like another unlucky day. Or maybe they are just super fun places to hang out.
Friday, 21 June 2013
The lone pediatrician currently stationed at this base is Katie, whom we met briefly on Sunday when she picked us up from the airport. The Air Force shipped her to Misawa two years ago in the same annual dispersion of newly-minted doctors that sent Kristen to Anchorage (which, it turns out, is not so far from home after all). A second pediatrician was here with her but has recently moved on to another assignment, as will Katie in a month when she moves back to the U.S. and two new doctors fill the slots here. In the interim, she has been left as the sole provider tending to the responsibilities of a two-Doc patient population (including the accompanying 24/7 on-call status requiring one to scurry to the hospital within 20 minutes of being paged, which tends to foul up one's nights and weekends), leading to her entirely justified call for temporary reinforcements - an eight-week "manning assist," they call it. That request was somehow funneled to Kristen's clinic, where it was split it into two four-week blocks and Kristen was asked to cover the second half of it. And so here we are - Kristen wielding her professional expertise to assist a colleague in need, and me sitting in a hotel room taking detailed notes about the specific brand of pet food vessel that the baby now sits on while she poops.
We haven't yet seen much of Katie, as she has spent this week fully preoccupied with some sort of fake night shift related to the aforementioned Exercise. But we ate dinner with her last night, joining her at an Indian restaurant in town as she met up with a Japanese medical student who had briefly rotated through the clinic several months prior. (Katie told us an easy way to remember his name was to think of the phrase: "Mi casa, su casa," but I immediately forgot which Japanified parts of that phrase were his name. Mikasa? Sukasa? I think it was Sukasa.) I don't believe he was expecting to dine with two American strangers asking uninformed questions about the Japanese medical education system while their kid spent an hour systematically depositing an entire plate of naan onto the floor, but he was a good sport. He even came up with some pretty good uninformed questions about Alaska.
Tonight we are again eating with Katie, this time at Kappa Sushi, one of a national chain of 350+ restaurants featuring a pair of cartoon mascots that I can't figure to be anything but amphibious monks dressed like Chippendales dancers. It is a "conveyor belt" sushi place, with small plates continuously whizzing past one end of the table slightly faster than it seems like they should be. (There is more than one incident in which Katie, sitting on the end of the booth farthest from the belt, suddenly exclaims, "Oh, grab one of those, those are good!" and I must execute an ambitious twisting lunge towards a plate of fish that has already migrated several inches past my head.) This is a good spot for Megan, who is digging the food. Many of the other diners are also families with small children, and the intense ogling of our adorable Caucasian baby by women in adjacent booths is matched only by Kristen's ogling of their adorable Japanese babies. I feel like we should take some sort of intermission to let everybody snap photos with each other's offspring so we can get on with dinner.
The food is good, and cheap - all plates are a fixed ¥105 (about $1). I am not a fish economist, but I suppose this is what happens when there are tens of thousands of restaurants offering the same locally abundant food that everybody eats all the time. This place is also remarkably efficient -most of the food is immediately available the moment you sit, and a touchscreen menu is mounted at the head of the table for ordering certain drinks and special items, most of which get sent out quickly on the same track (they get labeled with your table number). Our only interactions with a human waitress are when she brings our beer - they are wise to your schemes, underage airmen and high school kids - and then returns to count our plates and issue a bill. Per the horrible English version of Kappa Sushi's website (the content of which looks to be mostly copied and pasted from internal corporate memos), the kitchen even employs "sushi robots," "designed to squeeze and form specially seasoned rice (shari) into a bite size," which of course they do. There are at least 60 people eating in this place, and they could probably run it with like four employees.
But about those Kappa mascots (OK, everybody buckle up for our first Completely Insane Japan Thing): Subsequent research of Japanese folklore (I am in deep) reveals that they are something far more bizarre than frogs exotic-dancing their way through seminary. As thoroughly described in an extensive online resource called A to Z Photo Dictionary of Japanese Buddhist Statuary, Gods, Goddesses, Shinto Kami, Creatures & Demons (and largely corroborated by several other equally fascinating accounts):
Kappa are Japanese flesh-eating water imps who live in rivers, lakes, ponds, and other watery realms. They smell like fish and are generally portrayed with the body of a tortoise, ape-like head, scaly limbs, long hair circling the skull, webbed feet and hands, and yellow-green skin. ... About the size of a child aged 6 to 10 ... The defining characteristic of the Kappa is the hollow cavity atop its head. This saucer-like depression holds a strength-giving fluid. Should you chance upon the quarrelsome Kappa, please remember to bow deeply. If the courteous Kappa bows in return, it will spill its strength-giving water, making it feeble, and forcing it to return to its water kingdom. ... the Kappa is also sometimes called the shirikodama (anus ball) vampire. The shirikodama is a mythical ball at the mouth of the anus. In order for the Kappa to steal the liver of the victim (by reaching its arm up into the victim’s anus), the Kappa must first suck out or remove the shirikodama, which means certain death for its former owner. ... Kappa folk also have a liking for cucumbers.So Japan's version of Big Boy is a bowl-headed predatory tortoisoid, mischievously scheming to rip out your liver via your butt unless you distract him with a crudités platter. (And I was just about to try to force some tenuous Thelonious Monk/Amphibious Monk pun before I stumbled across the butt ball bandit thing. Thanks, Completely Insane Japanese Folklore!)
We sustain the apparent theme of the evening with an after-dinner visit to a ¥100 shop called Daiso. It is also a big national chain, largely identical to $1 shops in the U.S. but maybe bigger than any that I have ever been in. We pick up a few things for the room and briefly browse for weird cheap souvenirs, but Katie steers us elsewhere for Japan keepsakes, noting that most things in these stores come from China. I still consider buying a few hilarious things before remembering that I can just take pictures:
I guess you can't blow the budget on a fancy English-to-French-to-Japanese-to-Chinese-to-Japanese-to-French-to-English translator that actually knows all of those languages and still expect to sell a perfectly good wood tray for a dollar.
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