A 1964 Kyushu Conundrum
Local custom, or personal comment?
Fukuoka Airport was formerly US Air Force Itazuke Air Base. Mark Kennedy’s Real Gaijin July 11 substack article about Kyushu’s tourism boom
reminded me of my visit to Fukuoka in 1964 when the airport was still a US Air Force base. Originally constructed for the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force as Mushiroda Airfield in 1944, it was used from 1945 to 1972 by the US Air Force as Itazuke Air Base. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukuoka_Airport).
At the time of my visit I was a 19-year-old Marine radio operator manning the Iwakuni US Marine Corps Air Station radio facility near Hiroshima. Another communicator and I were dispatched to set up a radio relay site on the beach near the Itazuke Air Base as part of a Pacific Fleet network exercise. Two experiences from that visit live in my memory.
On the Base. The first was the shock of seeing everyday Air Force life compared to our Marine existence. In Iwakuni, one wasn’t allowed off base without the civilian attire including a collar on the shirt and a belt holding up the pants. Itazuke paraded airmen leaving and entering dressed in everything from shorts to pajamas, and with minimal or no ID checks by gate guards. Other Itazuke rules, if there were any, remained hidden to us. In Iwakuni, Marines and sailors under the Corporal E-4 rank had to return to base by midnight (the Cinderella rule), and drinking alcohol was not allowed until the age of 20; enforcement was lax for sailors but strict for Marines. We found no mention of either rule for airmen. Marine punishment for drunken disobedience could be physical, which had advantages: an MP’s illegally whacking you with a nightstick was not going to be officially recorded, and bruises eventually go away, whereas a service record book entry follows the perpetrator for whatever is left of a ruined career.
(Many years later, in 2007, I was training for a Japan-based security job at the Blackwater Training Center in Moyock, NC, and nightstick clubbing was part of the curriculum. The instructor advised against applying punishment to the head or joints as it was illegal, could cause injury, and would be extremely painful, and I thought, Yeh, you’re right about that painful part, bro!)
Watching those airmen living almost like civilians filled us Marines with the mixture of contempt and envy the incarcerated feel for the free. (You ex-cons know what I’m talking about.)
On the Beach. The other experience haunts me to this day. Several women clad in two-piece rubber suits were gathering seaweed in the surf near our radio relay site. A middle-aged one came out of the water and walked up to us smiling, and I wondered what she wanted and how to communicate with her in my limited Japanese. She stopped about ten feet from us, and still smiling, dug a hollow in the sand with one heel, lowered the bottom half of her suit, and – as the sun glinted off her gold teeth – squatted and dropped a load in the sand. Then, still smiling, she covered it up with sand using that heel, raised
her pants to the clothed position, and returned to the surf and seaweed.
That was 61 years ago this spring and I’m grateful to record that it’s never happened to me again. If a mating ritual, it was a total failure. What do you think it meant? A local custom?
On second thought, don’t tell me...