30 March 2006

Last Call

The fog is thick this morning, and the cherry blossoms are on the trees, and there is a crappy newspaper at my hotel door. USA Today, I think, the one with the bright colors written for high school kids, if they could read.

There were days I would have killed for a newspaper, and sometimes it seemed it would come to that. Finding a recent copy of the Paris Edition of the New York Herald was heaven, but there were none of them in Yokosuka. They were in the newsstands that catered to Western businessmen. Usually the 25-cent edition of the Pacific Stars and Stripes had to do.

Sweltering in the summer. Cold wet and brief days in the winter. It is a long walk back to the ship from the main gate in the dark, the security lights haloed by the mist and rain. Puddles on the tracks for the dockside cranes, past the secret club that the Submarine guys maintained on the top of the warehouse and the smell of seawater and diesel fuel.

The path led though the wide dank tunnel driven by the industrious Japanese in the old days when the emperor was divine, and the curious walled-up caves punched into the hills around.

Being alone far away keeps you on your toes. That Japan still had ties to the great defeat, and in time, I was halfway from the signature on the Missouri, anchored over in the Sagami-wan, to the announcement that there would be a curfew on all naval personnel outside the main gate at 11:00 pm on weeknights, and 1:00 am on the weekends.

There have been incidents of violence of late, and they are alcohol-related. There were break-ins, and a killing.

My Commander at the Third Fleet had a saying, normally on a Monday when the list of weekend outrages was read at the first morning meeting of the week. He said nothing good ever happened after midnight, and he was in favor of the strictest regulation possible. The Admiral had started as a Boatswain's Mate, and he was in a position to know.

That is why it was so nice to flee the environs of the naval base and catch a black-diamond train north to Tokyo, where there were not so many Americans. Violent crime then was almost unheard of, unless you were dealing with an American, and one or both you were drunk.

The Old Sanno Hotel was the destination of choice in the capital. It occupied the wonderful border between the Roponggi and Akasaka nightclub districts was a case in point. The Army had retained management of the place, and spent not a penny on upkeep. They were going to give it back eventually, and never even took down the coregated sign welcoming the troops back from Korea.

It was a shame, since the hotel had a history that went back before the great earthquake of 1927, and it had been one of the first to built with reinforced concrete to help it survive, and it did that and the American bombings.

That is why it was appropriated by the Army, since it was still standing, and why it was slowly crumbling when I first walked into the place in the late 1970s. Dump or not, it was a convenient place to stay, and the food was cheap, if uninspiring. Not like it was outside. Even then Tokyo was expensive, and the exchange rate was three times was it is now.

It is gone now, since the rightful owners wanted the land back. The Japanese kindly built a nice new facility for the Americans that was convenient to nothing.

The Old Sanno was an excellent place for a traveling man, a crossroads of the ExPat community in the capital. It was a splendid place to enjoy the paper, and the news a few days old, and a cold Kirin beer or three before going out on the town and opening the wallet wide to let the yen fly away.

Outings to Tokyo were treats that had to wait for the blue moon that the deployment cycle and the watch bill to align.

In the meantime, there was the world outside the gate, and it was always there. something more approachable. The Honcho district of Yokosuka is a maze of narrow streets outside the gate of the mountainous Naval Base. The Navy had appropriated it as swiftly after the victory as the Army had grabbed the Sanno.

The Honch, as we called it, welcomed the American warships with a certain inscrutable equanimity. The Imperial Navy had five aircraft carriers home-ported there, but they were underwater.

The occupation of an implacable foe was deemed in those days significant enough to merit the allocation of a major force. It was news when General Macarthur cut the force down to 188,000 American and Commonwealth troops. That did not count the Russians glaring down from Sakhalin Island, and from the occupied Kurils.

I don't know if the accounts of the occupation were ever studied in much detail at the Pentagon. MacArthur had to use Japanese troops at the beginning to maintain security and control the vast quantities of ammunition that were laying around in preparation for the defense that never happened. He directed the use of existing local governmental structures as well, at least as he was re-structuring an authoritarian society to prepare it for democracy.

There was no restriction on alcohol then, except that there was not much from home, and the troops were directed not to consume local products at the beginning. The General was a surprising man. He refused to enforce a non-fraternization policy, for one thing, and the embrace of America and things American by the locals was profound.

The Crossroads Bar was the place we usually chose to end the night on the Honch. Sumiko was the bartender who took care of us, with a distant affection. She was woman of sultry eyes and grave dignity, and perhaps still is. She seemed ageless at the time, an illusion perhaps enhanced by the dimness of the narrow room. She might have been fifty, which was about the age of the Japanese woman who was killed there a few weeks ago, beaten by an Airman from the Kitty Hawk .

As of this week, though, the brakes are going on. The American presence in the Home Islands has been continuous for over sixty years. The force is being stressed, as it is everywhere, by the requirement to back-fill Army units that are occupied elsewhere. Tempers might be frayed by that, I don't know.

It is no excuse for violence, certainly, and I suppose I commend the curfew, if it promotes a neighborly presence. I certainly couldn't stay up that late these days even if it was VJ Day all over again.

It certainly could have been more Draconian, since it didn't impose prohibition. The curfew did not mandate Last Call. It just moved it up a little.

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