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Uniformed school children scurried about the Zushi train station, speaking in quick, undecipherable beats of Japanese, talking about cartoons or superheroes or whatever it is that Japanese kids speak of.

When I was growing up, I played ‘cowboys and Indians.’ What was it that the Japanese children played? Certainly the mythical chiefs and gunslingers of the American west held no relevance here. From my readings, I knew that English children of both post World War eras played ‘English and Germans,’ recreating their own nation’s recent history.  Certainly, whatever the Japanese children played would have little to do with World War II. Perhaps they played Samurai.

With the whistle of a train, the kids shot up, ran aboard, and were gone. I stood on the platform alone, just me, my mother, my sister and her two young ones.

With the exception of the kids, we each held  four large suitcases apiece. On top of that, my mother pushed a stroller and my sister held the youngest child on her back.

A few hours earlier we had just finished cleaning the apartment. Everything in there was gone now. It had either gone with the movers, or it had gone in our bags. And now, like the foolish tourists that we were, we hauled a dozen pieces of heavy luggage across the Tokyo-bound subway lines, bumping and grinding our way back toward the metropolis. In a day’s time we would be leaving Japan. But for the night we would be staying in a hotel near the airport, a small little place just outside the city.

The receptionist had paused in shock when we called to make the reservation.
“English?” she said, barely able to pronounce the word.

We’d waited a few minutes while she found another employee who could understand our native tongue.

The hotel we were staying at wasn’t used to having American guests. It was an old Japanese business hotel, a three-hundred year-old Japanese business hotel to be more specific.

Sure, there were plenty of western-style places to stay near the airport -- places that used beds instead of futons, places that served coffee instead of tea, places where the entire staff spoke at least some English.

But my mother was insistent. We were in Japan and if we were going to spring for a hotel room, we were going to stay where the Japanese stayed.

We would sleep on futons. We would use the communal baths. We would eat the traditional breakfast. We would leave our shoes in the lobby. This wasn't some historical timepiece either; this was how most Japanese lived.

After dumping our bags at the hotel, I took off on my own, my camera slung around my shoulder, my computer on my back, my notebook in my pocket, and my pen behind my ear. Down the street from the hotel was a thirteen hundred year old temple. Up the street from there were nightclubs, gin joints, and an old Japanese graveyard where some sort of sunset parade was beginning -- a crowd of women in Kimonos chanting as they wheeled a decorative float down the street.

It would be a late night, an early morning, and a long flight back to the states.