2 November 1989

Hello,

I am now in Fukuoka, Japan. We arrived yesterday morning. Another guy off the ship (Al Cadwell) and I did the lost tourist tour of the city. We found a few of the normal tourist traps, which is quite remarkable since there aren't many here. Fukuoka was not made for the tourist trade. Most restaurants/bars will not even let you (us ugly Americans) into their fine establishments. Some kind of nationalistic bigotry. Very little English is spoken here, so that adds to the confusion. The town is very clean and I saw only a couple of bums on the street. Everything is quite expensive. Al and I went on a twenty-dollar taxi ride to nowhere. We were trying to get to the nearest hot spring. We knew the name of the place and we had a spot on our crude city map of roughly where it was, so we hopped into a taxi and off we went. The language barrier proved to be too large for this mission and we had to finally give up. We ended up being dropped off very near where we got into the taxi. It was a nice sightseeing tour though. The whole ordeal was quite amusing in the end. Later we decided we wanted to get something to eat, so we headed off down this street with all these light and fancy buildings in search of an eating place that suited our tastes and pocketbooks. Well, we walked down that street, then down a few others, and then we walked right into this little mom and pop food place. We decided immediately that this was the place, after not choosing many others along the way. We ate a delicious dinner, which wasn't very much (compared to the other prices we had seen). When we left we discovered that we were exactly across the street from where we started our trek.

I am on duty today. I will have tomorrow off, and the next off until dinner time, when I have to be on the ship for some fancy reception that we are hosting. At five o'clock this afternoon there will be a protest on the pier. It is very nice of them to tell us. They have to have a permit to hold a demonstration here in Japan. When we came into port yesterday we were greeted by an "ANCHORAGE GO HOME" sign and some guy yelling similar things over a portable PA system. We found it quite amusing since we would gladly oblige them, but that's not possible. We really don't want to come to Japan and they don't want us here, but this is some big political good-will visit.

Yesterday marked the end of 37 straight days at sea. I stood 221 hours of watch during the month of October, which is just over seven hours of watch per day. I figure that I averaged about fourteen to fifteen hours of work per day. I also averaged about five hours of sleep per night, which is not surprising since every other night I would have either the midnight to three watch or the three to seven watch depending on which rotation I was on. I really dislike starting my day at two-thirty in the morning. This was the longest and most arduous period at sea for the whole deployment. I'm glad that it is over with. We have only one more Amphibious operation to do. It is a real easy one, also. We had a period of about three weeks where we didn't get any mail during our 37 days at sea. That did not help anybody's morale at all.

My reading program has been detoured slightly. It's still progressing just fine, but in a different direction than planned. "The Trial" is quite a trial to read, so I am taking it in bits. I have already read two other books in the middle of my reading "The Trial." The other books are "A brief History of Time" by Stephen J. Hawking, and "Foundation and Empire" by Isaac Asimov. Both were enormously entertaining, and took no time to read, unlike "The Trial."

7 November 1989

Yes, I survived Japan. I like Japan, despite all the obstacles that have to be encountered routinely. On the evening of our last night there our ship held a reception on our flight deck for some people from the city of Fukuoka. I'm not sure how they were chosen, but some were police and others were from their self-defense force (Army). There were some U.S. college exchange students there who were collateral guests, church friends of one of the policemen. We all had a great time there. Its too bad that the reception was on the last day there instead of one of the first days.

We will pull into Subic Bay, Philippines in four days. We will be there for about nine days. I will have my birthday while we are in port there. It will be on a Wednesday (middle of the work week), but I won't have duty that day fortunately. We will be in Hong Kong during Thanksgiving. The American Embassy there is arranging host families for interested people to have Thanksgiving dinner with. I have signed up for this. I will have two more days off after Thanksgiving, so maybe they can be a tour guide or just a source of info for my sightseeing of Hong Kong.

Well, that's all for now. Talk to you later.

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