Looking for the Maneki-Neko Love Hotel

By Christine Kriha Kastner

Japan has long been known as the Land of the Rising Sun, but it is now better known as the Land of Cat-Cafes, Green-Tea Matcha Lattes, Love-Hotels and Orion Beer!

Together, Don and Christine Kastner traveled to Japan to attend the 5th Uchinanchu Festival on the small Pacific island of Okinawa, where Chris once lived as a teenager in the 1960s with her U.S. Army father and family.

The sound of choppers hovering overhead . . . takes me back to my childhood. I grew up hearing them in the background . . . or coming in for a landing. It was a comforting background soundalong with the roar of jets streaking through the skies. I was a military brat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496927743

Christine Kriha Kastner

Finding her own creative calling in the world, Christine Kriha Kastner wrote a memoir in 2011 called Soldiering On, Finding My Homes—Memoir of an Army Brat. That book was a finalist in the 2013 San Francisco Writing Contest. A writer and editor, living with her family in Cleveland, Ohio, she has worked as a stringer for several Northeastern Ohio newspapers. Kastner is a member of the Military Writers Society of America. Her first book rests upon library shelves in the military reference area, often positioned between Seal Team Six and Soldier Dogs—something she never quite expected. This book continues her story.

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© 2014 Christine Kriha Kastner . All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/29/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-2776-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-2775-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-2774-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014912957

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Contents

Prologue

Back on the Rock

Simple Warning …

Fifty over Sixty

Disaster Update

Military Farewells

Counting on Wes

Are We There Yet?

Welcome Parade

Justin Wentworth

Opening Ceremony

Meeting Wes

Through Terry Gong’s POV

Where was 1498 Oyama?

Kubasaki High School

More a Kazuko than a June …

My Passport Country

Saying NO to Sake

The Power of Facebook

Band of Brats

Stand By for a Fighter Pilot!

A Story That Now Can Be Told

Zooming With the Wykles

Murasaki

Round, Shiny Objects/Still BIG in Japan!

Deke, Deke, Deke

Pachinko … Anyone?

Closing Time

Back to Sam’s By-the-Sea

Looking for the Maneki-neko Love Hotel

Uniquely-Japanese-y

Meeting Majewski

Ernie Pyle

Taxis, Buses, Ferries… Ferries, Buses, Taxis!

Monorail

Sata Andagi

Right-Left-Right

Dave Barry Does Japan

Impellitteri

Joining the Tomono-kai

Extreme Politeness

A Most-Effective Weed Killer

Juku-Hell

Sensei and Me

Anything for Promotion

Rikuzentakata’s Boat

A Million-Dollar Wound

Stay Off the Skyline

The Girl with the White Flag

Hiroshima

Forgiven, but not Forgotten

Futenma Shrine

Military Brat

Acknowledgements

References

Brat Alumni Associations

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams. – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I don’t have a method. All I do is read a lot, think a lot, and rewrite constantly. It’s not a scientific thing. – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Prologue

Islands don’t float.

I used to think they did. It made perfect sense—to a second-grader.

When I was a little girl, my parents unwittingly provided me with a valuable toy—a wooden puzzle map of the United States—one that I learned to assemble, while at the same time learning the names of the states and geography! That was the best thing ever for a little girl who would grow up to move around the world.

Not paying attention to my teacher, I would gaze with fascination at the large map in my classroom at Park Avenue Elementary School in Tacoma, Washington. I would stare at it and think about all the places in the world. I thought about how I would like to travel to some of those exotic-sounding places.

It was like I knew I’d be leaving soon … and Mrs. Reid never caught me in my geographic daydreams. I was just passing through.

Dad was a sergeant in the U.S. Army, stationed at Fort Lewis. He was ordered to report to Fort Ord, California, and we were on our way! I can remember how we all piled into the Rambler station wagon—Mom, Dad, me, my brothers Raymond and Danny, and our dachshund. We were on the road again, and the best part of that drive down to California was when we crossed the state line and Mom started singing, California, here I come … right back where I started from … where bowers of flowers bloom in the spring … each morning at dawning birdies sing at everything. A sun-kissed miss said, ‘Don’t be late!’ That’s why I can hardly wait … open up that Golden Gate … California, here I come.

Mom had all of us kids singing along with her. She loved Al Jolson and played his music all the time. I knew all of Jolson’s hits from the time I was a little kid and heard those scratchy-sounding recordings from the original 78s played over and over.

Anyway, that fascination with maps and globes continued throughout the rest of my life. Our son Paul flipped on the lights in our basement one day and commented on the array of globes perched atop the bookcases along the walls, Have you counted lately, Mom?

I hadn’t counted. But there are eight. Unconsciously acquiring globes through the years, I’d been picking them up secondhand at estate sales and at rummage sales … a vintage Replogle Starlight globe with black oceans that was popular in the 1940s … a Cram’s Imperial World globe … a Replogle stereo relief globe, showing the depths of the Mariana Trench to the heights of the Himalayas, as well as a stunning land and water globe showing the continents in bright green with the oceans in dazzling sapphire blue.

Out-of-date globes share space equally with others because I appreciate the countries that no longer exist and those that now go by new names. I like to view the world as it was, as well as how it is now.

One thing was certain—I would travel the world. I started kindergarten in Munich, Germany and ended up in Washington State for a few years in that civilian elementary school, and then we moved down to California. And when Dad got orders for Okinawa, we found ourselves living on a small island in the Pacific Ocean!

Back on the Rock

Julia’s right here with me. With every step I take, as I walk through the lobby of the Dai-Ichi Hotel, I am flooded with memories from five years before—when I shared this trip and a room in this same hotel, with Julia Gillion.

But this time I’m here on the island of Okinawa with my husband, Don. As the taxi pulls up in front of the impressive wall of clay shisa dogs … as we walk through the hotel lobby to the elevator … through the alcove with the bright chartreuse-green pay phone, where Julia and I struggled to place silly phone calls back to the States … as we look out from the balcony of our hotel room at the same view of the Pacific Ocean and the hills of Awase, that Julia recalled from fifty years before … as we make selections from the buffet breakfast in the dining room, the scrambled eggs and the pale-looking buta sausages are still offered … as Don and I walk the streets surrounding the hotel and we come across those little concrete steps where Julia and I sat down to rest on our first evening …

As Don and I move through Okinawa together and locate so many people from that earlier trip, I think of Julia and how much fun we had together, searching for places from our past.

Julia Gillion and I were particularly well-suited to one another—because we were the only ones in our respective families who thought about and remembered with fondness living on Okinawa in the 1960s.

Until we traveled together, neither of us knew that the other had spent time daydreaming about walking along the little dirt roads that led to where our off-post rental houses once had been located—hers along the Pacific Ocean side of the island—and mine alongside the East China Sea side.

I was an army brat. Julia was an army wife. We were part of two families who serendipitously found one another while crossing the Pacific Ocean aboard the USNS Barrett in November of 1963, following orders to move to the small island of Okinawa where my father and her husband had been stationed, awaiting our arrival.

More than forty years had passed from the time I lived with my family on the island of Okinawa, when I heard about a Kubasaki High School reunion trip timed to coincide with the 4th Worldwide Uchinanchu Festival. So in 2006 I traveled across the ocean with the mother of a friend from my school days—73-year-old Julia Gillion from Columbia, South Carolina.

And then a few years later, all the memories unspooling in my head for years finally came to rest between the covers of a book—an accomplishment that had been my lifetime goal—to tell my story—to record my memories about growing up as an army brat.

I wrote Soldiering On—Finding My Homes, Memoir of an Army Brat and did what I always wanted to do! Finally, my story of growing up as an army brat rests securely upon the pages of a book.

Now my husband and I were on a similar adventure—to attend the 5th Worldwide Uchinanchu Festival in 2011 and anything could happen. We were determined to make the most of this trip!

Simple Warning …

Flat stone monolithic tablets—some as tall as ten feet—with worn-away lettering, stand along the hillsides of coastal Japan, ancient wisdom from before many of the villagers were born. They stand silently—with a simple warning: after an earthquake, drop everything and seek higher ground.

Tsunami stones are a common sight along Japan’s rugged shoreline, along the area which bore the brunt of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake that struck on March 11, 2011, resulting in unimaginable damage and loss, with an estimated 29,000 people dead or missing.

A deadly tsunami struck the area in 1896, killing 22,000 people; another struck in 1933; still another in 1960.

But time passes. Old warnings fade. Many tsunami stones were ignored when coastal towns and villages expanded and construction boomed.

But not in the tiny, sparsely-populated village of Aneyoshi, which kept its eleven households safely out of harm’s way when the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck. That ancient stone warning saved them.

We watched endlessly over and over again on that day in 2011, as CNN repeated footage of the great wave that engulfed the coastal region of Tohuku … and came crashing down through those narrow streets, pushing along cars and trucks like they were bathtub toys … we watched the wash of water as it made its way across the fields and pushed everything in its path up against a bridge … entire towns destroyed and dragged out to sea … and we watched the people evacuated from the Sendai Airport, as they stood helplessly atop the airport on the roof.

As we watched in fascinated horror, the massive wave of water rolled in … and then rolled in again … but many of the people of Japan couldn’t see what we were seeing over and over and over again in an endless loop because they were caught in the disaster.

Almost immediately, posts began to appear on Facebook from people with ties to Japan …

One of those was from a frequent business traveler from the West Coast to the Far East. He had posted a comment from his Tokyo hotel room a few days before—an early warning of what was to come … when everyone would wake up to a different Japan … forever changed.

March 8, 10:11 p.m.—Earthquake in Tokyo! I am sitting in a high-rise building in Shinjuku and this was the longest earthquake I have ever been in … the building was shaking and swaying for about three minutes.

And then a few days later, the following appeared from his brother:

March 11 at 2:02 a.m.—Everyone is wondering if you are OK and hoping you are not still in Japan. Let us know something soon.

And then, many more urgent messages:

March 11 at 2:55 a.m.—Was just in a very bad earthquake sending from my iPhone narita evacuated standing outside with hundreds of people with no flights in or out but I am ok.

Four minutes later—This one was bad.

And five minutes later—Thank goodness for the Internet and Facebook no phone but can connect this way things were coming down from the ceiling of the narita terminal freaky.

March 11 at 3:16 a.m.—At least we are inside again but only on the first level of narita good thing because it’s freezing outside.

March 11 at 5:42 a.m.—Still here at narita flights are cancelled and no way to get out of the airport no trains running no roads open out of narita area no food or running water so bathrooms are closed but everyone is calm and peaceful.

March 11 at 9:54 a.m.—I was just checking in when the first quake hit. My bags are still sitting there at the counter so I am one of the few that can’t get to their bags. No coat but I do have an extra pair of socks. I’m just happy to be here.

March 11 at 4:27 p.m.—After three hours of actually pretty good sleep on the floor at narita airport I feel good now trying to get a flight out maybe narita to Houston to San Francisco. It’s the long and winding road but it will lead me home.

March 12, 3:25 p.m.—I am home finally … and seeing news for the first time in days … I was right in the heart of it but had no real access to news … no CNN but could see some monitors around the airport showing Japanese news … and my only real link was my phone which I used to access the internet and facebook, still could not make calls even this morning when I left Narita … now I am seeing all this for the first time … wow.

Along with that final post, he included a photo of his corner on the stone floor, where he managed to get "three hours of actually pretty good sleep."

He captioned it, "my room on the executive floor of the Narita Air Terminal."

After making it safely home to San Jose, he commented to all of us: Since my return, I have received many e-mails and messages and phone calls from friends. I am slowly getting back to all of you to let you know how much it meant to me to be able to sit there in the middle of the night at Narita after the earthquake and communicate with everyone using my I-phone connected to the Internet and Facebook … it saved me from feeling alone and isolated … thank you.

Then this comment appeared: March 13, 2011 at 5:55 a.m.— "I’ve slept for a few hours, drifting in and out … woke up a couple of times thinking I was still in Japan and had some strange dreams all around the earthquake … all very normal under the circumstances. Thinking back to my own experience, that I was not hurt, not really impacted, and that I am home safe, I am thankful, grateful … and still feel compelled to say, help however you can, pray for those affected, and stay away from traveling to Japan for a little while, you will only create a negative impact on the already overburdened systems … things will return to normal soon, but right now, it’s just not a good time for a visit … many people are trying to get home that were out of the country when this happened, and the social infrastructure is already stretched to the breaking point. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to come from the outside into the middle of a national emergency it can only have a negative impact on the efforts to help, and mend and heal. I’ve been watching the news non-stop while awake, and am amazed at how much I missed just sitting at Narita … and amazed how much I experienced while sitting at Narita … it will be with me forever …

Since that ordeal, I wonder how many times he passed through Narita Airport on business, and paused to look at that corner to remember …

Back then, I didn’t know that businessman. I had never met him. Part of the Facebook phenomenon, he was one of those friend/connections whom we acquire through others. It was through Amy Nitahara that I approached him through Facebook because Amy, who had helped plan the previous trip to Okinawa, thought that he would be a key person in organizing the next Kubasaki High-connection reunion trip to the Uchinanchu Festival.

That early spring disaster in Japan kept Don and me wondering all summer long what our chances would really be for a return to Okinawa in October of 2011. So many reports about dangerous radiation levels had us and many other people concerned about the safety of traveling to or near Japan. Each day, the news got worse. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant had been ravaged by the earthquake and tsunami, resulting in an uncontained radiation leak, posing an increasingly scary environmental hazard.

We learned that some people were cancelling travel plans and avoiding travel to Japan!

By the end of summer, we were still uncertain about our trip to Okinawa, even though it was located about 900 miles away. Reports were that the damaged nuclear plant had reached a stable state known as cold shutdown, a benchmark for the eventual decommission of its reactors—something expected to take up to four decades. Radiation was continuing to leak into the sea. We kept reading about the crippled nuclear reactor, described as a situation that was under control, and workers who had volunteered to expose themselves to the radiation and then something was reported about triple meltdowns. Frightening.

Nine months after the earthquake and tsunami, reports claimed that the plant continued to pose a major environmental threat. Estimates were that at least 45 tons of highly radioactive water had leaked from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, with some of it reaching the Pacific Ocean …

Clearly, things were bad—but no one knew just how bad. Once the disaster disappeared from the headlines, people far removed from it forgot about it.

Every time something was reported, I paid close attention. I clipped and printed many news stories to add to my reference file. Only four days post-tsunami, novelist Kazumi Saeki dispatched a story to The New York Times in which he described how he experienced strong aftershocks while he wrote from his home in Sendai. He and his wife were at a hot springs in Sakunami, fifteen miles away from Sendai, when the great quake struck. He learned later that it was a giant quake originating in the waters off Miyagi, off the Sanriku coast in Iwate Prefecture to the north; off Fukushima Prefecture to the south. It lasted six minutes.

Strong aftershocks continued as Saeki wrote his story, in blackout—by moonlight and candles. A hand-crank radio was his sole source of information.

He told how With the lights of the city extinguished, stars shone brightly in the night sky. When I looked out toward the ocean the next morning, I saw in horror that neighborhoods close to the sea had simply vanished. Many of our friends lived in those areas. In the distance, I could see only the trees planted to protect the shore.

"I found my elderly mother, who lives nearby