At Long Last,日本 or…
(Innocents Abroad Part 11)
…Around The World in 80 Days 1980
If you’ve been following along, you’ll know when we last left off on our misadventures I’d pulled a collegiate all-nighter in anticipation of arriving at our first foreign port of the semester: Kobe, Japan. Feel free to continue on from here as we sail around the world, or catch up by reading the first ten parts of this series, all available for free on my substack page.
The entire Japanese leg of my journey was recorded in a separate notebook, a thing I’d forgotten till I read the notation in my primary journal. Problem was, I didn’t know what I’d done with it! Did I even still have it? I could still picture it, but through the years my various Semester at Sea memorabilia had become dispersed into separate keepsake boxes, drawers, closets—well, you know what it’s like.
Decades of moves and of focusing on other minor matters like careers and parenting had somehow dulled the edge of those long-ago college days and all that went with them. But alas, she persevered, and here it is:
My account opens: “At six A.M, Luce and I bundled up and went to watch us close in on Kobe. The eastern sky, now off the bow to starboard, was just turning pink & the lights of the city were asparkle, winking at us even from Mt. Rokko. It was well below 40º and the wind was cold, but just as we got up to the Sun Deck, the ship stopped. We watched crew members put down the anchor & looked around a short while. We were the only ones up there & it was great.”
I remember a lot of moments like that, ones in which my roomie, Lucy, and I—or I alone—managed to enjoy a sense of isolation despite being on a small ship housing 800 souls. But it surprised us that no one else wanted to brave the chill dawn that day to greet Japan’s approach.
We were just finishing what would be our longest stretch of time at sea for the semester, sailing westward from Hawaii—over ten days—and were ready for another land adventure. Our time in Hawaii had been the semester’s shortest in-port time (just two days), and our time in Japan would be double that.
The all-nighter caught up with me and soon I was literally asleep on my feet at the rail, so Lucy suggested I nap. I left her to return to Classroom 8, dozing soundly till awoken by a crew member trying to clean the room around my comatose body. The ship hadn’t moved.
I went to breakfast where Lucy soon found me, entertaining me by waxing poetically about the sunrise she’d stayed behind to watch. Then it was my turn to entertain her, so we went to kill some time in Classroom 10 where she sat and listened while I played the piano. Tiring of that, we turned on a TV to discover Japanese commercials were hilarious.
Finally, at nine, the ship’s propellers started turning again and we hurried to watch, this time hanging out a pair of port side windows. A trio of tugboats met the Universe and maneuvered her into a berth at a dock aswarm with color and activity. Beautifully dressed geishas with armloads of flowers were surrounded by a waving crowd.
Excited, Lucy and I hurried to the Student Union, the usual place for the handing out of passports so we could disembark. Our delight at being first in line soon fizzled when an announcement let everyone know that passports would be issued on Prom Deck instead. The line that had formed behind us did an about-face, and now we were at the very end.
Thankfully, the line moved more rapidly than it had in Hawaii.
As Lucy and I got our passports, a second announcement (this one from my heartthrob, Dean of Students, Tymitz) said an unscheduled welcome-to-Japan event would start in ten minutes—back in the Student Union. Most other students, believing disembarkation imminent, had returned to their cabins to prepare, leaving Lucy and I to arrive first in line once more at the Student Union door.
It was great; we got front row seating to a spectacular hour-plus full of fun and festivity, Japanese style. First, a chorus of six girls in blue gowns came in. They said they were the “Blue Angels,” and after singing the most gorgeous song, they entertainingly interviewed one male and one female student chosen from the crowd.
After that they handed out red carnations and “Kobe Remember” journals to those of us in the front two rows. They finished by translating a greeting from an official whom I note without certainty in that journal as “maybe the mayor of Kobe.”
Captain Wu was summoned and presented with a lovely clock, then he and Dean Tymitz were each given a large bouquet of flowers.
But the best part—and one of my clearest memories of the entire semester—came next: a genuine Japanese hoe-down complete with thunderous applause and a-hootin’ ’n a-hollerin’ by the whole student body.
On walked a five-man band, a group of young Japanese dudes dressed in jeans, plaid shirts, and cowboy hats. Toting a guitar, banjo, mandolin, base, and fiddle, they launched into a rousing rendition of John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads, although their accents turned it into, Take Me Home, Country Loads.
The crowd went wild, right through an offering of Orange Blossom Special, then simply exploding with enthusiasm when the band broke into an energetic rendition of Good Old Rocky Top, singing, “Gool ol’ Locky Top, Locky Top Tennesseeeeee!”
To this day I’ve never since been able to listen to the song Rocky Top without singing it the way I heard it in the Student Union of the SS Universe all those years ago. Filming wasn’t something available to me back then, but seeing this on YouTube today, makes me wonder if the band we enjoyed in 1980 was All That Grass in their younger years:
If it is, they’ve played Rocky Top long enough that they’ve gotten the R’s down pat. If it isn’t, this is still a great rendition reminiscent of that long-ago day in the Student Union aboard the SS Universe—just picture them forty years younger!
The band got two standing ovations; it was an act they should’ve ended with, but no, the Kobe welcome committee saw fit to finish with a 40-minute sleep-inducing lecture by some fella who talked about foreign trade and political policy. Really? In my Kobe journal I recall it as “pure torture.”
It didn’t help that every student knew the mail had come onboard during the show, and all thoughts had turned to hearing from home. Remember, there were no cell phones in those days, making Semester at Sea and other student overseas adventures of the day much more immersive than any taking place today.
Reading the crowd, Dean Tymitz wisely (but diplomatically) persuaded an early end to the lecture, the presenter protesting he still had five pages of notes to go. Whew. Thank you Dean Tymitz!
But the dean had logistics on his mind more than pleasing the crowd as it turned out; we had to be through immigration by noon, which meant everyone disembarking to have their paperwork processed and approved, and quickly at that.
Lucy and I nevertheless swung by the postal boxes, the same ones we’d been in charge of filling in Hawaii. Eureka! Ten letters from back home! Delighted, I saved them for later and hurried to join everyone outside. Once cleared by immigration, Lucy and I hightailed it back to our cabin to prepare for our first day in Japan.
Finding we were still unable to disembark, we went to lunch, reading some of our mail as we ate. I had four from a friend—Julie—and one each from my back-home bestie, Dani, my mom, and my sisters, Earth and Fame (you can read prior issues, such as part 3 of this series, or this issue of my substack, to be introduced to my sisters if you’re just now joining the adventure).
I also got one from my friend Jo, whom I called “Gonz” after the character Gonzo Gates on the TV show Trapper John, M.D., which we both loved. He dad was a surgeon & she gifted me one Christmas with a set of authentic (stolen) scrubs I wore and cherished for years.
I still had those scrubs years later (worn as pajamas), when as the mom of a medically fragile child I spent months on end living in hospitals to be near him. I’d become quite versed in medical lingo by then, having trained as an EMT, and whenever I was up in the middle of the night was often mistaken for staff.
Young Love
One piece of mail I got wasn’t a letter at all. It was a card—a Valentine’s Day card—from a friend I’d been longing to be more than just friends with. The card from Dan came as a shock to me, having decided as I had by then that he was gay and just hadn’t realized it for himself.
I still have that card. The front features Snoopy of Peanuts fame sitting at his typewriter atop his doghouse. In the first frame he’s typed, “‘I can’t tell you how much I love you,’ he said.”
In the second frame Snoopy has typed, “‘Try,’ she said.”
The third frame shows he’s typed, “‘I’m very fond of you,’ he said.”
Then on the inside it reads: “‘Nice try,’ she said.”
The card aptly encapsulated our relationship, which consisted of long, deep discussions, lengthy letters, and even overnight visits at one another’s family homes (I slept with his sisters)—none of which had prompted Dan to so much as hold my hand.
We both came from big, Catholic families: me, the youngest of nine; he, one of the older among eight. If I recall correctly, both of our families had a cadre of five sisters.
Had I been able, as I sat on the ship that day, to fast-forward a decade, I’d have seen myself attending his wedding in Brooklyn. After he’d married his beautiful bride, his mom saw fit to take me around at the reception and introduce me to everyone as “Dan’s old girlfriend.”
Okay, I added the italics there. She did mean previous, I’m sure, but I heard old, and suddenly I found myself wishing I’d worked harder to persuade my husband to attend the wedding with me—maybe even bring along our adorable toddler to boot!
In any event, I guess she didn’t know Dan never so much as held my hand—that in my mind he never advanced beyond just plain friend. But then again, she was old-school Catholic; maybe the only qualifications I ever needed to clear that girlfriend bar was to be his friend while being female. No hand-holding required.
More Mail
Tucked inside the letter from my sister Fame was another, a bonus letter she’d forwarded from my friend, Steve Nosek. Steve and Dan and I were tight, the semester we spent together at Mansfield State University, but sadly, Dan’s wedding would be the last time I saw him.
Lucy and I finished lunch and I stashed away the last few letters for later, eager to get out and explore Kobe. But once off the ship, merely exchanging some money became a major task that ate up a good bit of time. Such things were not pre-arranged by Semester at Sea, which would have been mighty nice.
Everywhere we went we ran into groups of other students trying to do the same thing: in a place I call “Kobe International” in my journal, in an underground mall (which was interesting in itself), in another place I refer to as “The Newport.”
Then I describe a set-to that erupted, but I can’t recall it first-hand: a heated exchange between someone named “Mr. Hanna”—who I think was trying to help several dozen of us gathered students find a way to exchange money—and Dean Tymitz.
Somehow it filtered down to the gathering that a department store named Daimaru was exchanging money, so everyone took off to find that. Once there, Lucy and I got in the money exchange line with a sense of relief only to have the window close just as we were next to be served.
Jeez-a-frickin’-lou, already.
Frustrated, we veered off from the others and headed down a small side street to do some exploring on our own. Almost immediately we came to a little shop with an official money exchange sign in its window and went inside.
No one spoke English, but we showed our passports and held up a $20 traveler’s check while simultaneously offering the international distress sign for I’ve no fucking clue: raised eyebrows.
The couple of the mom-’n-pop shop were happy to exchange one twenty for each of us, which suited us fine, the man displaying his good sense of humor by trying to pronounce our names while examining our passports.
With yen in our pockets, we headed back toward a market we’d seen, because markets meant pastries, and Lucy and I had taken a solemn oath to sample pastries in every nation we visited—probably the primary reason I put on twenty pounds before seeing America again.
On the way we passed a Shinto shrine, which we visited, and encountered Janis (see part 10), accompanied by what was no doubt his student conquest—du—jour.
After our pastries set us back 200 yen ($.80), a turn down another street nearly set us back 6,000 miles: there stood an unexpected sight, a McDonald’s.
Those were days long before I’d come to view chain restaurants as the gagfests they are, so of course we had to sample whatever a Japanese McDonald’s offered. Never mind we’d already had breakfast, lunch, and a 200-yen pastry that day; traveling is about the food, baby, the food!
Me? I had the fillet-o-fish sandwich, an order of fries, a Sprite, and (of course) a hot fudge sundae. That I even recorded all that in my journal tells you how much I held eating in high esteem.
But hey, we'd walked miles just trying to find a place that would exchange a traveler’s check—in a port city, no less—so we’d earned a few extra calories, right?
From there Lucy and I decided to check out the tallest structure in Kobe, another solemn vow we’d taken—to look at each city from the highest possible vantage point. In Kobe that was the 26-story Trade Center, which cost us only 200 yen.
From the observation deck we had a fantastic 360º view, so we stayed to watch the sunset. All around and below us the lights of Kobe came on one by one, a fallen field of stars glistening at our feet.
Not far off stood the Universe, her evening lights shining like iridescent pearl necklaces strung from stem to stern. Before heading back to the ship, Lucy and I decided we would finish our stay in Japan by dining in the restaurant the observation tower also boasted.
On our way back we got lost, wandering through a train yard and under elevated highways, but eventually ended up at the terminal. I stopped to buy a set of chopsticks in one of the shops for 600 yen ($2.40), then we stashed our day gear on the ship and went back out for an evening walk.
This time we wandered in the opposite direction, crossing what I refer to as the “copper bridge.” I write in my journal of our high spirits, of how we talked and laughed and sang. We came across a park in the process of being built, its walkways designated by teardrop-shaped markers embossed with 5-tree emblems.
It made us recall how Reikko, our guest ambassador who’d been aboard from Hawaii to Japan, had told us that five was an important and symbolic number for the Japanese. A little further along the path we also came across a five-tiered pagoda surrounded by a moat.
It was 9:30 by the time we got back to the ship, my feet so tired from walking all day that Lucy had to pull my boots off. We snacked on crackers in our cabin, then while Lucy wrote in her journal I pulled out my four letters from Julie I’d never gotten to. I didn’t get to them then, either; I awoke the next morning with my face plastered to the first one, drool staining Julie’s words.
I did a lot of that, apparently, falling asleep on open text books, on classroom desks, on letters from faraway friends. It takes a lot of energy to be a world traveler, I guess—even when you’re only twenty.
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Thanks for joining me again for another weekly visit on substack. If you enjoy my Monday Morning Literary Bric-a-Brac, I hope you’ll share it with others, comment below, and consider becoming a paid subscriber to help me keep it going.
Tune in next week for more explorations of Japan, including a visit to some schools and a Ryokan. Meanwhile, be sure to mark your calendars for the opportunity to connect with me at these up-coming events:
June 8th 12:00 to 5:00
Kidzfest in Old Town Winchester, VA – we’ll talk about simple machines (like those Shay uses to save her friends) and have signed copies of my middle grade novel, Shay The Brave, on hand for purchase.
June 15th 10:00 to 2:00
Author And Automobiles in Columbia, PA – in conjunction with the popular Thunder on the River car show, I’ll be with other authors at the Columbia Public Library and signing copies of Shay the Brave.
June 29th 11:00 to 5:00
Lititz Pridefest in Lititz, PA – a family-oriented day in Lititz Springs Park that’s hosted by Lititz Chooses Love; I’ll be there signing copies of Shay and cheering on everyone who, like Shay, finds the courage to embrace their most authentic self.