Few Nukes hit the Town

First Day In Japan – Mass Transit

September 29th, 2008

My Son who is a Nuke on the USS George Washington sent me an email with a description of his first day off the ship in the country which will be his new home for a couple of years. I decided to post the part of his day when he and his friends had to tackle getting in and around the mass transit station. He has been studying Japanese for a few years but this is his first time actually using the knowledge “for real”. I always wondered what possessed people to ask in the foreign tongue if they speak English… Anyway, the first of what I hope are many installments of my Son’s Far East adventure.

“The streets were new to us, the signs with the engrish on them (attached photo) and the way just everything was situated. This will be our new home for a while and it was a lot to take in. On the base there are cliff like faces, the area itself seeming to be a sharp hilly terrain that was molded to allow buildings.

One off the base (after stopping by an ATM and getting yen out, 103 yen to the dollar) we entered the greater Yokosuka area. As an instant immersion, everyone around us was Japanese, all the buildings were labeled in Japanese with smatterings of English below the large Japanese lettering. We walked a ways that we thought was the train station (the brief we had gotten on locations having been back in may so our memories were a little fuzzy. After walking for 15-20 minutes, we decided we must have remembered wrong and went back the way we had come and went the opposite direction from the entrance to the base. I started asking people, “eigo wakarimasuka?” which is do you understand English?” which I got a few no’s to, so I then asked “Yokosuka-Chou wa doko desuka?” which is saying “Where is Yokosuka-Chou?” (the name of the train station, but also separately Yokosuka and Chou were both towns that were right there), I couldn’t remember the word for train at the time, but the first person I asked that to understood what I was looking for immediately and pointed and gave loose directions which I only caught most of, “…go straight this way…. it should be on the right… make sure to keep going straight… (advice we didn’t listen to exactly…)”. We were emboldened by our senses of direction now and after going down the street for a ways, decided on a sort of Y connection to make a right instead of going loosely straight which lead us slightly to the left. Well needless to say we didn’t find the train station in a timely manner and I stopped and asked for directions again. This time we were told a specific street to turn left at to get there. But after nodding profusely and setting out again, we realized that all the street signs were in Kanji and we couldn’t read them. We did however gauge accurately the distance in which she said it was and turn on the right street (whew) and made it to the Yokosuka-Chou train station!

It was there that we were met with 8-10 machines that looked like they gave tickets and 6 or so entryways that had ticket slot things. It seemed easy enough, we bought PASMO cards and put like 50$ (5000Y) on each card and went up to the machines, and with abandon each put out plastic cards into the paper ticket slots simultaneously jamming 4 of the 6 entryways. (oops.) The service guys were behind a window right next to the machines so they saw it all happen and came out and wordlessly opened each machine and returned each of our cards. He also pantomimed just whooshing the card in the air above this black square on the gates and viola it popped up with the amount of money on your card with a soft beep. We uttered a lot of “sumimasen”s and “gomennasai”s (pardon me, sorry) and walked quickly away from the scene. Who knows how many people jammed the machines that day and the day before. But now inside the train station we could see the interweb map of the trains of Tokyo/Yokohama. Its a crazy crazy map of like 20-30 train lines interconnecting and criss crossing all over with Japanese names all over the place for towns and stops and cities.

Luckily every place that had a Japanese name had its English written form below it. So we just found our destination (Akihabara) and saw which lines ran where. We would have to take the Zushi Line to Yokohama, then from there take the Tokaido Line in through Tokyo to Akihabara. As simple as all of that sounds, the 90 minute train ride that that is turned into a 3-4 hour ordeal of going more out of the way then in the right direction most cases; mistaken trains, mistaken directions, at one point we thought we were on the right train only to discover that we were about to arrive in a town that wasn’t close to where we were going, it took us 5 minutes to find where that town was on the map and realize we had again gotten on the wrong train (it really isn’t THAT hard, but for some reason we just had bad luck. lol) Sometimes a train that isn’t listed on the main placard will stop at that station, and you just have to check the signs ON the train itself to know. We just assumed that if it was stopping on that gate that it was the right train . Lessons learned.

I will tell about Akihabara and Tokyo in another email.”

Son, I do look forward to it

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