A Road Trip of a Different Sort

So…here’s that girl I used to know again, this time in Kyoto during late, late December of 1975, or perhaps New Years Day of 1976 or shortly thereafter. Memory fades, and it has been over 30 years, ya know. That’s her traveling companion immediately below, taken in much the same spot as the first pic, from a slightly different angle.

As it is with most things, there’s a story here.

Long-time readers know The Second Mrs. Pennington and I met in Japan. She was on her second foreign exchange student tour, this time as a sophomore at Sophia University (photos) in Yotsuya … a borough of Tokyo. I was on my third tour of Japan with quite a different institution, stationed at Yokota AB. Just how we came to meet is a story in and of itself, but I’ll save that for another time.

It came to pass that TSMP, like all college students, had an extended break over the Christmas and New Years holidays that year. The Air Force, in its infinite wisdom, granted the troops nearly as much time off over the holidays as the college kids received. The usual drill was married people got Christmas week off and single folks got the following week off. So it was we found ourselves with a week or so off, and so it was we decided we’d go to Kyoto for New Years. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and we broke every rule there is about traveling in Japan, or anywhere else, for that matter. We had no reservations. We had no specific itinerary. We didn’t have any means of transportation, save for my very used 350cc Yamaha, and it was winter…not the time of year for an extended road trip on a bike. We had very little money. So… we did what any poor but adventurous couple would do: we decided to hitchhike.

And that, Gentle Reader, is simply not done in Japan. Never. Ever. Except by Americans who don’t know any better.

I should note this wasn’t the first time I’d thumbed in Japan…my Buddy Dan in Florida and I hitched from Wakkanai to somewhere around Sapporo and back to Wakkanai a few years before this lil adventure. And we had had a great time. So, after recounting my story to TSMP, she agreed to go with the flow.

Early one morning we loaded up a couple of knapsacks with all the warm clothes we had (it was cold, Gentle Reader… in the high 30s or so) and set out for the train station. We took the train from Musashi-Koganei (where TSMP had her apartment) to the end of the line, which was near the main road between Tokyo and Kyoto. Our trip would take about three and a half hours, by express train, had we decided to take the train.  

Drive-time would be slightly longer, and we estimated we could make it to Kyoto in about six or seven hours. We were fairly accurate on that count… we made it to Kyoto in about six hours, catching just three separate rides. Our last ride was from a young guy who went completely out of his way to drive us into the heart of Kyoto instead of letting us out on the highway on the outskirts of the city. Our driver vigorously and intensively chatted up TSMP in the process, I should add, during the entire two hours we spent in the dude’s car. All in Japanese, of course, of which I understood only about every 97^th word or so…but I knew what was going on. Some things don’t require words to understand…

So… after we exchanged addresses and such our new friend dropped us off in the middle of Kyoto in the late afternoon. We went and got something to eat and set about on our first task: finding a place to stay. What I didn’t tell you, Gentle Reader, is it’s tradition in Japan to return to the ancestral home for New Years… it’s the biggest travel-time of the year. With predictable impact on the hotels, any hotel, every hotel. As in: “no room at the inn.” Remember, we had no reservations of any sort. Afternoon turned into evening, evening turned into night, and our door-to-door inquiries at each and every hotel were fruitless. Everyone was booked solid. We were starting to get a bit concerned, as you might imagine.

Digression. We wandered into a part of downtown Kyoto which seemed simply loaded with small hotels, and I thought we’d struck gold. TSMP, OTOH, was highly agitated and refused to enter the first of about six hotels we encountered on this block. She simply exclaimed “NO, Buck! I’m NOT going in there!” with little or no other explanation. So… I went in this little hotel and was greeted by an elderly woman who gave me a big smile and vigorous north-south nods when I asked, in English, if she had a room for the night. “Cool” sez I to myself, and stepped outside to get TSMP. TSMP and I re-entered the small lobby and the old woman’s demeanor changed completely, as in: she threw us out. Quickly. Unceremoniously. Pretty damned close to rude, for a Japanese woman.

Rinse, repeat, for the next three hotels on that block. Then it finally dawned on me what was happening, and what TSMP was too embarrassed to tell me. I was trying to get us a room in a whore house. Three of ‘em, to be exact. And TSMP was furious that I couldn’t read in between the lines. So much for my perceptional abilities at the ripe ol’ age of 30. We left that neighborhood most ricky-tick, and by the time we were three blocks away we were both doubled over with laughter at the situation, the reactions of the whore house madams upon seeing TSMP, and the whole delicious irony of my absolute thickness. But the situation was anything but funny...

It was late by this time…around 10:00 at night, and we still had no place to stay and our prospects were pretty bleak. We spotted a wine bar cum coffee shop and went in to get a cup, warm up, and think about our options… which at this point were “slim” and “none.” Or so it seemed. And then our luck changed.

The coffee shop we were in was small, consisting of a small bar and perhaps three tables in the room…total seating capacity of 12, or less. There were two young, long-haired guys and a girl drinking coffee at the bar, and we took seats next to them. TSMP struck up a conversation with the girl, asking if she knew of a hotel near by where we might find a room. The answer was “no,” there weren’t any…and if there were, they’d be all booked-up, what with this being the holidays, as she implied we should damned well know. And then it struck me…perhaps we could make some sort of arrangement here. I just might have something I could trade in return for accommodations. I made some discreet inquiries of the two young guys through TSMP and my hunch was rewarded. One of the young guys took a used matchbook out of his pocket, scribbled something on it, and slid it across the bar to me:

I smiled, TSMP smiled, and our three young friends smiled. The deal was done. The five of us paid our respective bills and were off into the night, destination unknown but hopefully warm. We had a place to stay.

To be continued…