The things that I remember the most from my one and only trip to Japan are the thoroughly weird stuff – weird being defined as being different from back home – people stripping down to their skivvies on the train to Kyoto, ice parlors that served scotch, a temple to penises – peni? – in the village of Komaki, fishhead soup for breakfast, fake pirate boats, hosing off before getting in a hot-tub to bathe, torii gates going nowhere or standing in the middle of the water, and an unbelievable number of people standing on the top of Fujisan. I would like to say that the people were the most memorable but that is not true (for example, I have no memory of the guy I am posing with, above, or where we were).

There were three very memorable groups of people, however, all women which should not be too surprising considering that we were two men in our early twenties with no access to datable women. We did see American Red Cross women who came by our Tac Site on the first Tuesday of each month to give us donuts, but they only dated officers and, really, only officers stationed in Seoul which is code for staff officers (which is code for officers with connections).

In our travels around Japan, at some point, we crossed Lake Biwa, the largest freshwater lake in Japan, on what looked like a pirate boat. I don’t remember where we were going, how we got there or what we did at the other side, but the ferry was bizare. On the way to the departure port, we passed a torii gate and like every sight, like every anything, there were Japanese taking souvenir pictures. Everywhere we went, there were Japanese tourists and all the tourists were either taking pictures or having their pictures taken.

While we were waiting to get on the pirate boat to cross the lake, we saw two women waiting to get on. One was wearing shorts that would be short, even today; they were very short then. I am not going to say that we were hyper-ventilating but Terry did manage to get me to stand next to her to get my picture taken.

At some point, I think when we were near Osaka, we ended up going on a pearl diving boat. I guess that they were not really pearl divers, they were oyster divers and the pearls were in the oysters. Either way, they were diving for what my mother then called cultivated pearls because the oysters were raised in a farm (I think the grain of sand to start the pearl was also planted in the shell). Much later when I showed her the pictures, my mother was rather dismissive saying Cultivated pearls were not as good as real  pearls. When I asked her how somebody could tell the difference, she didn’t know and I am convinced that nobody can.

Either way, why we went there or how we got on the boat is in the mists of the past. What isn’t a mystery is that all the divers were women.

However, fifty years later the thing that I am happiest for having done in Japan, the thing that I remember the most, is hiking up Mt. Fuji. The Japanese call it Fujisan, san being an honorific. There are several different classic ways up Fujisan and I have no idea which one we took. What I do remember is that we took the bus to the base of the trail where there was a huge crowd.  Once there, we had no idea what to do and nobody seemed to know English. Happily, among the people in the crowd, were a group of young, international students, mostly girls, one of whom spoke English. They had come to watch some other students start their hikes but they were not making the climb themselves.

The English speaker was a Thai woman named Xæppeil (which means apple and it pronounced just like apple with a very heavy Thai accent).  Xæppeil, the woman in the orange and pink dress, also spoke French and Chinese as well as, presumably, Thai. Both Terry and I feel in love immediately. We would ask Xæppeil a question which she would then ask the Chinese  student – the woman with her head hardly showing – who would then ask the Japanese woman (obviously the woman in the white dress with pink polka dots). The Chinese woman would frequently have to write the question for the Japanese woman to understand. Then the answer would come back in the other direction. It was sort of like the game telephone using three different languages.

Our plan was to spend the day hiking Fuji, however we soon found out that the usual method was to hike at night to see the sunrise from the top. We had no choice but to spend much of the day hanging out with the students. We started late in the afternoon and the trail was wall to wall people. Climbing Fuji is more like going to a huge event and parking way too far away than hiking, say, the John Muir Trail. There were thousands and thousands of people on the trail, many of them helping their old parents. I remember it being some sort of special ceremonial ancestors day, but I can’t find anything like that on the web, so I am probably wrong. There were however lots of climbers in white, ceremonial, dress carrying special climbing sticks – kongotsue – which we also carried.

Mt. Fuji is 12,388 feet high with all the trailheads being above 6,500 making the climb much easier than it might, at first, seem. Every so often on the trail – I don’t remember the interval, maybe every 250 vertical meters – an old man would be sitting by a habachi and we could get a cup of hot tea and get our kongotsue stamped with the altitude. Higher up there were mountain huts where we could stop for the night. How far one hikes before stopping at a rest hut is determined by when you want to start rehiking in the morning to get to the top by sunrise. I recall that we chose a hut at about 300 meters below the summit and paid something like a day’s budget for the night and a cup of tea.

We got up at 4 AM and made it to the top for sunrise. On top it was like a county fair with the crowds overwhelming us. This is, after all, the most climbed mountain on earth. Today, I would welcome the crowds. I would realize that the crowds were a big part of the experience but, then, we wanted it to be like summiting Whitney or  Mont Blanc. We did find an empty spot and I stood on a high mound while Terry took my picture.

Three days later we were back in Korea and fifty years later I still have the picture and the memory it evokes.

While I was stationed in Korea, I was accumulating vacation days at the rate of 30 days per year (as I remember). I must have some days accumulated already because, after about eight months, I had enough days accumulated to take a thirty-day vacation.  Most of the guys were saving their vacation days for when they got back to The States but a fellow GI, Terry Upman, and I decided to use ours to go to Japan.

We had several reasons for this, but the over riding reason was that Japan was actually doable for a couple of neophytes like us. China was closed, Indonesia was convulsing and neither one really knew anything about it, and the same with Cambodia or Thailand (in the not knowing anything about it department). Of course Vietnam was out of the question, even then. But I had an actual travel book about Japan;  Japan on Five Dollars a Day.

We found out we could hitch a ride on a MATS – Military Air Transport Service – plane from Kimpo International Airport near Seoul to Tachikawa Airbase near Tokyo for free  and that it was only a four-hour, or so, flight. Another good deal was that, unlike Korea, we could wear civilian cloths in Japan, so we both wrote home and asked our parents send us some clothes. Japan on Five Dollars a Day in hand, we went on vacation. Or leave as the Army called it.

When we got off the plane in Japan, our clothes were waiting and for the first time in eight months, I was out of uniform. That lead to my first shock. Terry and I were good friends but we were from very different backgrounds and seeing each other in our civilian clothes added a level of information that left us both realizing how different our backgrounds were. And how much it didn’t matter.

(I want to make a pitch for National Service here. It is better for the country and it is better for our young people. First, it would also be much harder to send young men, and women, into the meat-grinder of – often unnecessary and even counter productive – war if the pool of citizens from which they were drawn was the whole country. Those people who didn’t pull military service, could work in hospitals, pick-up along roads, repair trails in National Parks, do something that would add to the community. Second, I never would have met Terry if we hadn’t been stationed together in Korea. I would never had met guys from Louisiana or Georgia or New York, my view of the United States – much like young privileged people today – would have been much more parochial.)

As soon as we got on the train to Tokyo, we realized that Japan was not Korea. From what I have read, we pretty much trashed Japan but it didn’t seem like it to us. Compared to Korea, Japan seemed very first world.  We got into Tokyo late Friday afternoon – maybe early evening – and it was packed with young hikers going to the mountains.

In Tokyo, we stayed at a retreat center named something like Pacific Peace Foundation (the irony was not lost on us). It was a great place and it cost us about $2.50 per night – which was the top of our range – and the view from our room, of a peaceful garden, would probably make it a $500 per night room at the Hyatt today.

Our first stop was the world-famous – even then – Ginza district of Tokyo. The lights were nothing compared to now or Shanghai now, but we were very impressed after eight months in rural Korea and I probably would have been impressed in I had just flown in from San Francisco. Tokyo was in a heat wave of ten days over 35°C and we ate dinner at a German beer garden on the top of a downtown Tokyo building.

Being in Japan in the early 60’s was a little surreal. One afternoon, we just sauntered into a newspaper building and spent the afternoon figuring out how they printed the paper in characters (as I remember, they cast each page in metal rather than used movable type). I remember the keyboards being huge like 500 characters huge but I may be wrong here. Strangely, nobody questioned two American military looking guys just wandering through the building about 19 years after the end of the war.

We found the Imperial Hotel by Frank Lloyd Wright and wandered through. It loomed so large in my imagination and it was so dwarfed by the higher buildings around it. I remember the room doorknobs being really high and many years later found out that Wright did that to make the short Japanese women stand on their tiptoes to open the doors (he thought it was charming, or something).

^{Not my picture.}

Our first trip out of Tokyo was a train ride up to Nikko in the mountains. Nikko is a very popular Japanese tourist town and it was packed. With good reason, it is a knockout. I need a disclaimer here, I was in Japan close about 50 years ago and I am not sure that all the buildings that are Nikkoesq are actually in Nikko, some may be somewhere else.

This building may not be in Nikko. The one thing that I do remember clearly is that the white things on the tree are not flowers, they are wishes that people made and then tied on the tree at this temple. I have no idea what my wish was but I do remember leaving one.

 To be continued…

“there is no there there” is a quote from Gertrude Stein in her Everybody’s Autobiography (although, I have to admit that I thought it was Virginia Wolfe). I often – often being used pretty liberally here – hear it  characterized as to mean that, after Paris, Oakland is nothing, but I like Oakland and I think it actually has another meaning. I think that it means that the emotional charge that her home and street carried while Stein was growing up in Oakland is no longer there when she returned.

In 2004, shorty after Michele gave me my first digital camera, I spent an afternoon photographing one or two giant, hybrid, Epiphyllums. I love the pictures from that afternoon. The two pictures above are from then. Over the years, I got more Epiphyllums and, over the years and I have shot more pictures of them. This year was particularly outstanding with lots of orange flowers, a couple of pink flowers, and for the first time, two white flowers. The flowers are better than ever

but the pictures aren’t.

There really is there is no there there and chasing the there doesn’t bring it back. The good news is that there are lots of other theres around.