ONJUKU, JAPAN

The next two days were wonderful and strange. I was taken to a large house in a beach front town named Onjuku in the prefecture of Chiba, where my Great Uncle, Tomoshisa Aoyama (my maternal grandmother’s youngest brother) owned a house that he designed himself on a half acre of land. It was a mixture of traditional Japanese design with a modern twist, so there was lots of open space in the central living area, which was unique to Japanese architecture. You can see something of the layout of the house in the Facebook pictures.

You can make out in the pictures that the only real furniture in the house was a long wooden board that served as the main dining table, propped up on cardboard boxes and lined on both sides with pillows, and a very expensive looking leather sofa set and a fancy wood table. Furniture in Japan is always expensive, and this seemed particular classy.
So classy, in fact, that my uncle Tomo was featured in the official Onjuku community brochure. If you go to this page and click on the first link with the “NEW” animated gif, you get the official brochure in pdf format. On the second page is a picture of Tomo in his leather couch, answering some question in Japanese and generally looking like a VIP.
Soon after I arrived and met the people as best I could without sharing a common language, and was able with some complicated gestures to work out the family relations, Tomo took out an old scrap book of pictures of my mom’s family, which I looked through carefully and pointed and shared some laughs with the family. I was also offered a beer, which I drank and then began to feel quite sick. Unfortunately this was also when they brought out a big plate of sashimi, which was delicious but unfortunately I couldn’t keep any of it down. I was able to point to my stomach and gesture in such a way that made them give me some pills, which I took and soon felt better.
The kids were running around playing, but didn’t have much to play with aside from a deck of Pokemon cards and some cardboard boxes they used to make helmets and dioramas of varying levels of creativity.

I kept kicking myself for not bringing my little package of toys and gadgets to play with, which would have been perfect for the day and would have endeared me to the kids immediately. Without the toys, I was basically a helpless visitor, stuck on the couch with a stomach ache and being completely unable to say anything to anyone. The kids would sometimes come up to talk to me, and I wouldn’t know how to respond or what they were talking about. I put my hand over my mouth, which they interpreted as a demand that they keep quiet, and I didn’t know how to convey the fact that I simply couldn’t speak the language. It seemed to be their first encounter with such a situation, it was certainly mine. Trying to get on their good side, I let the kids play with my phone for a bit, which was severely underpowered and relatively unimpressive without an internet connection given the lack of fancy games saved to my phone, but which occupied them until they brought out their Nintendo DSs and showed me Pokemon and basically tried to outclass my technology. I prayed for a robot or a signal.
The father of some of these kids spoke just enough English to relay some important plans, like the fact that the fireworks wouldn’t happen until the following night, so I would be staying in the house for three days with my uncle. I knew I was severely underpacked and underprepared for an extended stay in the country side away from my computer and all my belongings, and resolved to never let myself be separated from my luggage whenever I travel.
This guy, who I think is married to another one of my second cousins, also worked very hard to explain to me how he was a huge fan of Evangelion, and that he would let me borrow the DVD’s he lent to Kosuke to I could watch the series. I smiled politely and nodded.
Soon we went for a walk. Half of the group went to the beach, and half went up the hills. I ended up in the beach group, and saw the other side of the Pacific Ocean for the first time. It would not be the last. On this walk I snapped my favorite picture of the whole trip.

We made it back, and my stomach had settled down enough to put down a lot of sashimi and drink a few glasses of Sake with my Uncle and the rest of the adults. They would talk and I would be relatively silent, and I accepted any food they put on my plate with an “arigato gozaimasu”. They would occasionally point at me and say something, mostly to each other, but I occasionally heard the words “Davey” or “Felicia”, at which points I would nod furiously in an effort to demonstrate some understanding and recognition. I retired fairly early that night.

One large bottle of sake is roughly 1.8L, and we put a hurt on this bottle right here.
The next morning, Kosuke’s parents left, and said I would be back in Tokyo the following day, after the fireworks. A cousin of mine and her two children, and my Uncle Tomo and his sister (whose name I never caught) stuck around to go to the beach for the day. It never crossed my mind to put on sunscreen, but I spent most of the day shirtless and trying to swim in the ocean. I did well for a while, then got too ambitious and ended up mildly panicking in water too deep for me to touch the ground, just barely able to keep my head above the waves. I made it back safely without causing a scene, but it scared me out of doing any serious swimming in the waters after that. My cousin tried to tell me about how much she loves Lady Gaga and MTV, and asked me if I watched MTV. I tried to explain how no one actually watches MTV any more, but my post-gen-X cynicism didn’t translate very well.
Sometime around noon, my uncle got the idea that we should go surfing, because I was asked by several people “You like play surfing?” I tried to explain that I had never been surfing, but I was interested in trying, and I was told that my uncle would take me later in the day when the surfing was better. We stuck around for a few hours longer, where my skin proceed to burn terribly. Eventually we left the beach and went to eat lunch, and I was told that we couldn’t go surfing that day but we would try to go early the next morning.
My little cousins showering naked on the beach was the only nudity I saw during my entire trip overseas.
We ate lunch at a traditional Japanese restaurant, after which the cousins went back to their home and I was left alone with my uncle. He took me to see a monument to an incident on Onjuku beach where a Spanish ship en route to Mexico washed up on shore, and the local Japanese villagers took them in and provided them with a new ship to return to Mexico. The three countries recently celebrated the 400 year anniversary of this event with a giant parade along the beach front. I enjoyed seeing the Japanese and Mexican flags fly together.
After the bit of sightseeing we went back to Tomo’s house, where we rested and napped. Tomo played a mix cd of highly abridged versions of classic and contemporary American songs performed by Japanese singers and MIDI keyboards. It was very strange; musically it was completely bland and on par with Karaoke versions of the songs, except with subpar Japanese vocal performances already included. Lyrically it often only included the first verse of the song and the chorus, just enough to get a sense of the tune and the hook. Songs ranged from U2 covers to Elvis to the strangest version of that fucking Third Eye Blind song I’ve ever heard (which also makes no sense with just the first verse and chorus), and surprisingly the Spiderman Theme Song once again, which apparently is still insanely popular in Japan. He eventually changed it to a talk radio station of some children’s call in show.
Besides Spiderman and Lady Gaga, the most common song I recognized playing around me was the theme song to Lupin the Third, which also surprised me since it was a cartoon from the 70’s and hasn’t been made for decades.
As it got on to evening, Tomo started saying the word ‘pizza’ and ‘English’ a lot, and we eventually walked back down to the beach, which was beginning to become overrun with people coming in from all over to see the fireworks. Some people were dressed up in Kimonos and such, most were just in beach clothes (board shorts or bikini tops). We eventually made it to a small restaurant and board shop selling beer and hot dogs to people as they passed by. They recognized Tomo (“Its the carpenter!”), and set up a special table for him on the deck. He ordered a round of beers and a pizza. The shop itself was mostly closed except for the hot dogs and beer that they were desperately trying to push on the flood of tourists headed towards the beach. The owner, a surfer dude from California, and his partner Kelly, a girl from Korea who spoke relatively fluent Japanese and English tended to us between hustling the crowd and selling Skyy Blue drinks to young Japanese men, who drank them with incredible zeal. Tomo and I used the opportunity of Kelly’s presence to have her translate all the things we had thought to say but didn’t know how to communicate over the last few days, and there was some good family bonding. We also had a few beers, which helped me cope with the growing pain across my torso as my sunburns made themselves known. Tomo, eventually rather drunk, said in a deep voice, “I am very happy”. We walked around to watch fireworks, and returned to the pizza shop for more beers. Later, we hit up an izakaya and had a few more drinks before heading home in a cab.

Among other things, Kelly explained that we would be going surfing early the next morning, and then to Tomo’s dancing lessons just outside of Onjuku, before heading back to Tokyo in the evening. I was starting to get antsy for exploring Tokyo, and especially for access to the internet, but I knew that Tomo had an apartment he would let me use in the city, so I wanted to give a good impression so he would let me have the place to myself.
The next morning around 8am we got out Tomo’s surf boards and went to the beach. I was tossed back and forth by the waves, eventually getting knocked off in front of my board that came crashing into me when it got caught in a huge wave. It cracked me in the ribs, knocking the wind out of me and generally convincing me that the Pacific Ocean didn’t want me back. I crawled out and laid on the beach in pain and waited for Tomo, who also got cracked by the board in his jaw. We limped back to the car after about an hour and a half; my whole body was raw and pink and sore, but I managed to smile for this picture as evidence of the trip.

We made it back to Tomo’s house, where I tried to shower but was basically unable to touch my body without screaming. We sat around for a few more hours; I wasn’t sure what we were waiting for, but eventually I figured out that Tomo’s dancing lessons weren’t until late in the evening, and that I would have to wait until the following day to do any Tokyo exploration on my own. I snapped some pictures of Tomo dancing, and played some games on my phone and basically tried to pass the time. When the lessons were almost finished it occurred to me to check if there was wifi around; I had gotten so used to assuming there wouldn’t be that I hadn’t even bothered to check. And there was, and it was fast with a strong signal. And which I was about to leave. I shot off an email or two and then logged back out.

It took another hour or so to get into Tokyo, at a rather large apartment that was clearly the business headquarters for Tomo’s old construction and carpentry business, cluttered with old paperwork and even older computers. Kosuke met up with us there, and brought my luggage, which was wonderful to have back in my possession. The apartment was not where I’d be living, and was currently occupied by Tomo’s daughter, who met up with us along with Tomo’s nephew (making them my Aunt and Uncle, respectively, though both were younger than me) at an Izakaya/Karaoke bar near the apartment. Everyone in the place knew Tomo well, and I settled in for another night of drinking heavy drinking on Tomo’s dime.
At this point, almost 4 days into the trip, I had yet to spend a dime of my own money apart from the fumbled phone calls in the airport.
They convinced me to sing a song, and they happened to have Bryan Adams, and though no one in the place knew the song I belted it out with some major feeling.

The red lantern says “izakaya” which means it serves drinks and Japanese bar food.
I have no idea what to do with a traditional Japanese toilet. I didn’t even try.
At a certain point, people got very drunk and asked to put on my hat and glasses and tried to look like me. Apparently I look like a goofy Asian nerd even to Japanese people.
After they took pictures looking like me I felt comfortable enough to take a picture with the hostess of the bar, who was in very thick makeup. She then served us a plate of fried chicken, and yelled “MY CHICKEN” loudly as she laid it down.
That night we slept on the floor of the construction shop. My body ached and I was unable to find a way to lay down without hurting badly. I eventually passed out from exhaustion. It took me twenty minutes to sit up the next morning, and another 45 minutes to delicately shower. It would be the last hot shower I would take in Japan.
Tomo took Kosuke and I to the little apartment in Aoi. It was entirely empty- no furniture whatsoever, no toilet paper, no hot water. It had two rooms, each with a working air conditioner. We brought a thin futon over from Tomo’s other apartment, and luckily I had packed some toilet paper in my luggage (which they laughed at, but damn it it was a good thing I was prepared). Tomo then handed over the keys, and the place was mine. Kosuke and I went back to Minami-Senju, and started to plan out the next few days.