HAKODATE: A Tale of Two Trips, Part V

Read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

Two years passed.

My friend, Wolfe, told me she would be coming to visit Japan for a month. She would spend the first half sightseeing with some people we knew from college but wanted to see me, too. We made plans to go to Hokkaido together because my place in Iwate would be on the way. She was mostly interested in going to Sapporo, but I told her I would only go if we could spend a few days in Hakodate. She obliged.

Wolfe showed up a few days before we’d leave. She knew a few of the other Americans living in my town, and they were able to get off work to spend some time with her. She met me in my office building to get the key to my apartment.

I hadn’t seen her in years. She had blue hair, more tattoos than I recall, and was showing a lot of skin for Japan.

We had tried dating for a little while in college but decided we worked better as friends. Then we started sleeping together now and then. It was simpler to just not worry about what our label should be. She would be staying with me, but I wasn’t really sure if we’d be sleeping together. This all rushed through my mind when I saw her waiting in the lobby.

“I probably shouldn’t come up, right? I’m too fucking sweaty and white and apparently scandalous for this country.”

She was right. The people at work already thought I was wild enough for going to all the underground punk shows and for wearing my orange Doctor Heming Grand’Pa baseball cap with a suit every day.

The next day, we went to a punk show, spent the next day being hungover and watching Master of None, and then it was time to go to Hokkaido.

Things would be different this time around. For one thing, I lived in the suburbs south of the city instead of in the countryside to the north. They had also completed the bullet train to Hakodate, so we would be arriving in style. Wolfe, as a visitor, was able to get a rail pass for tourism, and she had already been using it like crazy. I had to pay normal-style.

On the way to the local train station, it was hot as blazes. I had the longest beard I had ever grown at the time, and I had never trimmed it. I had my mirror-like sunglasses on.

“You look like, 80% more African American right now,” she said, laughing.

Spending time with her made me realize that other than the punks I knew, I really didn’t like any of my friends in Japan. We had known each other for about five years. We were in the same tour group when I visited the college we ended up at.

It’s hard to say what we were talking about. Just pure silliness. We got on my local train and had some time to kill before our bullet train ride. We stopped at a coffee shop in the station. When I worked on Saturdays, I would always eat breakfast there. It wasn’t particularly good, but it was cheap. And that’s what you want when you’re killing time.

I spent most of the meal trying to tell her a joke, but thinking about it was making me laugh so hard I was weeping. She took a picture of me crying in the coffee shop.

We picked up some lunch boxes and booze for the train ride. Wolfe didn’t like beer, so she got chu-hai.

“You know, Sapporo is famous for beer,” I said, opening a Sapporo on the train.

“Fuck you, dude,” she said.

Then I read Norwegian Wood until we arrived at the bullet train station. They called it Hakodate Station, but we had about an hour on local trains before we were at the real Hakodate Station.

The final leg of the local train ride was the same line I had taken camping years before. Things looked pretty much the same. I started wondering if I would actually leave Hakodate this time around.

Read Part VI.

These days, I’m just tellin’ stories.