Snoopy, the intercontinental uniter

Thursday was our forced day *ahem* I mean field trip outside the gates, as part of our Intercultural Relations seminar. I like to fancy myself a big adventurer, spontaneous and easy-going but with WTF Husband standing over my shoulder my stretching the truth abilities are rendered useless without being on the receiving end of an elbow to the arm followed by an inevitable guttural throat clearing. So I was glad that I had no choice in the matter. It was cold and for the fourth day in a row, I had forgotten to buy myself a scarf, even so it was awesome to head outside our very American base and see with my own eyes that I was, in fact, in Japan. I knew this because our group very obviously stood out from the other thousands of people we walked passed on the street. Streets by the way that were remarkably clean for a big city, especially since there were no trash cans anywhere in site. Trash is on a carry-out basis only. I learned this after walking around half the day with a strawberry stick in my pocket. ***Outside Hachimangu Shrine, there was a vendor selling candied strawberries on a ritz cracker. They were delish. We gathered it was a treat meant for little kids, as we heard lots of giggling going on behind us from the school ages girls and boys as we bit into them.*** Anyways, mind boggling numbers of people, who noticed when I got excited to have hot corn soup in a can from a vending machine or when in the absence of any other means of communication had to point to the plastic food model on display noting the lunch I wanted to eat. Fried ramen noodles with vegetables if you’re wondering. WTF Husband wanted to try the sushi go-round and I was willing, even showing an eagerness during the walk from the train station to the restaurant but once I saw it, I knew we weren’t ready for it. We’re sushi virgins and we need a little easing into it and this wasn’t the place for Beginners Sushi 101. California Roll…yes…raw…no.

Soup in a can and plastic noodles aside, there were two great things about our trip; retired Japanese man #1 and retired Japanese man #2. After our walk through downtown Yokosuka, we boarded our first train headed to Kamakura. When we got off the train, we were approached by a sweet old man on a bicycle. Very politely he asked if we were Americans, check, and if we were in the military, check-check. He carefully pulled out of his knapsack a handwritten letter with magazine pictures of sake and gyoza, cherry blossoms (Sakura) and grapes glued to it...is there something special about Japanese grapes? It was a letter to “Unknown Person.” We must have been the tallest and most obvious choices in a crowd full of American military. He asked us to read his letter and critique his grammar. Tidbits of his family life peppered the letter but the focus was on his lifetime dream to receive a letter from an American. His English was very good, his writing even better. I was touched while the ever-skeptical WTF Husband thought he was going to ask us for our account information in return for $134,000 if we could only help him with a small international matter. No, he wasn’t pushing a Nigerian bank scam on us WTF Husband. Now my list of things to do includes fulfilling retired Japanese man #1’s dream.

Feeling pretty good that I had successfully navigated a full conversation with a Japanese local, we ventured from the train station to see Tsurugaoka-Hachimangu Shrine in Kamakura. I’ll save that for a separate post. As we were leaving the shrine, retired Japanese man #2 approached us. Are we really that tall? He told us that he learned English from Snoopy. Reading or watching, I wasn't quite sure. We heard all the details from his one and only trip to America…baseball at Fenway Park, Abraham Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty. He didn’t allow us too much talking, though I tried to slip in a few Japanese words. If I was going to be his guinea pig, I was going to try and get something out of it myself. He didn’t crinkle up his eyes in confusion or gasp because I accidentally said something lewd or taboo, so I figured I did pretty well with my very limited Japanese. He recited the Gettysburg Address to us, while he held his baseball cap over his heart, something that I cannot even do in full. Then something very familiar happened, he told us about baseball at Fenway Park, Abraham Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty. I am now officially an international senior-moment identifier, certified in both America and Japan. On the second go round of the Gettysburg Address, we had to skedaddle out of there to catch our next train.