I started my stay in Japan at the Tsutaya Starbucks two weeks ago and returned on the morning of my last day. Not because it serves great coffee (it doesn’t), but because it was open and quiet and, I guess, pretty innocuous for someone feeling a little raw for having to leave a most wondrous place.
The Saturday was wet with the kind of rain that warms your skin when it touches you. And it was melancholy with the kind of longing for a home missed and a second-home, soon to be missed.
Looking out at a bobbing flow of umbrellas, I found out that my flight was delayed by a couple of hours, so I decided to make a quick trip to Yokohama.
Yokohama is the port city from which my maternal (and probably paternal) ancestors left Japan for Hawaii.
They boarded the Toyo Kisen Kaisha (T.K.K.) steamship named “America Maru” on June 14, 1906, headed for the Port of Honolulu in the Territory of Hawaii (T.H.).
My great-grandfather was 40 when he started this venture to farm sugar cane in Hawaii. Maybe not too much of a stretch from rice farming, which is what I’m guessing they did in Ni’igata. To this day, rice farming makes a huge contribution to Ni’igata’s economy.
Joining him were his wife, 32, and his two sons, 10 and 6. According to the ship’s manifest of alien passengers, my great-grandfather is the only one of the family listed as being able to read and write.
I got off at Minatomirai Station, which provides a view of the Port of Yokohama. The neighborhood is called Minato Mirai 21, which translates to “Port of the Future for the 21st Century.” It is a master-planned development started in the 80s.
The station opened up into a sprawling mall with a dizzyingly steep escalator. Announcements in Mandarin echoed through the grand entrance way. I didn’t hear much Cantonese or Mandarin during my trip, but Yokohama is home to Japan’s largest of three Chinatowns.
Right outside of the mall, there is a huge ferris wheel called the Cosmo Clock.
The big digital clock kind of takes away from the whimsy, right? In Tokyo, I noticed that whenever I wondered about the time, I could always just glance up at a wall or the sky and there was a clock letting me know the time.
Perhaps in Japan, a part of fun and leisure is knowing exactly how much time you have left to enjoy yourself… 🤔
I walked to a waterfront park with a sweeping view of Tokyo Bay, the Yokohama Bay Bridge, and general port activity. Fish frequently leapt out of the water and clumsily flopped back under the surface.
I stared out at the deep harbor water and though the surface was relatively calm, I felt uneasy. I was soaked to the core, as it was now officially pouring, but I just stood there.
The unease was probably just the non-swimmer in me, but I think it was also the sort of cliche moment of wondering what my family thought as they stood at this edge of land, waiting to board a ship that promised to take them to a few tiny islands in the middle of an unfathomably vast ocean.
Was there excitement and hope? Or trepidation only braved out of desperation? Or even more likely, a cocktail of all of these things swirled in their heads.
There were hardships (and scandals!) all along the chain of events that led to me standing there in the rain, but I guess the expedition wasn’t a total failure if a century later, some offspring would circle back to the point of departure, out of mere curiosity.
I thought about the relative ease with which I just traveled thousands of miles by plane and train and how my travels are nearly myopic compared to the way in which my friends and co-workers travel and see the world.
What do we gain and what do we lose when the world becomes so easy to traverse? How can it be possible for one person to travel so far, so safely, while for another person, it can be dangerous just to move around in your very own community?
There are forces at work today that are tearing our human family apart. Even if you have the best intentions, it seems impossible to bridge the chasms being blasted open day after day.
I’m not going to go all the way there right now — but I just wanted to take a moment to show gratitude for being able to take this trip. It opened my heart and mind to others, namely the people I started off my trip being so, I’ll say it, afraid of.
As an introvert, it is my tendency to close off connections more than open them, so I am thankful to all of the people and communities who sheltered and ushered this awkward traveler through.
To Yamanouchi Uncle Ozeki-san and family, thank you for treating me like family and for giving me a warm, safe place to return to each night!
To Tamayo, thank you for a chankonabe fit for only the best sumo wrestlers! I am certain that my physical stamina throughout my trip came from this bowl:
To the woman with the soft-serve ice cream cart outside of the Jigokudani Monkey Park, thank you for suggesting that I walk through Shibu-Onsen town and for running to your car up the hill to bring me a map, even when I ran after you begging you not to!
To Ken at Bud Coffee and Jazz in Obuse, thank you for the delicious coffee and Miles Davis. I hope you wear the Bernie “Ba-Ni” Sanders button with pride!
To Akiko, Momoko, and friends at Key Coffee, thank you for your rebel art spirits and for giving me a boost of creative energy when I really needed it!
To the kind couple at Himetsuru in Ni’igata City, thank you for Google Translating with me about Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Naomi Watanabe, and your lives in Ni’igata and Tokyo.
To my gorgeous and savvy travel partners in Tokyo, Quarry and Maria, thank you for the free-form adventuring and your loving friendship!
And to the moon over Zushi Beach, thank you for reminding me that despite the things that may tear us apart, in our shared view of you, we’ll always have one beautiful thing in common.
