The Wedding That Wasn't: Another Earthquake Story

Amidst all the confusion in the days immediately following the earthquake, I missed my regularly-scheduled hair appointment with Kumi. When I ought to have been sitting in Kumi's chair having goop dabbed on my roots, I was at the base movie theater watching Rango with Fearless and her girls. At the time we had no way of knowing that a week later Fearless and the twins would be waking up in Novi, Michigan, enroute to Arlington, Virginia.

So I absolutely do not regret missing that hair appointment. And I also do not regret shelling out $3 to see Rango when only a few days later our movie theaters stopped charging admission.

But missing that hair appointment became increasingly troublesome as the week progressed. As fears of irradiation mounted, I realized that the sudden appearance of a white stripe across the top of my head could very well tip the balance on this base from low-grade panic to mass hysteria. I didn't want to be responsible for causing a run on potassium iodide that would make the hospital pharmacy look like the bank in It's A Wonderful Life. I needed to reschedule that appointment pronto.

Erin and her three little boys marched off to the Navy Exchange to make an appointment for me. (In my defense, she looked ready to wring their collective necks; the schools here closed with no warning, all child-friendly activities on base were cancelled, and they needed some sort of distraction. At least that's how I've decided to spin this.) Erin managed to get me the first appointment on Sunday morning. I believe my appointment was the only one on Kumi's schedule that day. Kumi normally has a month-long waiting list. This is what we call "a silver lining".

Kumi is always glad to see me -- our relationship has spanned three years at this point, which is about a year longer than my relationship with any other hairdresser in the past twenty years -- but she seemed genuinely delighted to see me this past Sunday. And I her. I was eager to hear her "earthquake story" so that I would have something interesting to share with you that did not involve military ineptitude. We all need a break from that.

Kumi was on her way to her niece's wedding in Tokyo when the earthquake happened. She was wearing a dress (remarkable enough for her to mention and remarkable enough for me to pass along) and riding a Keikyu train when the ground started shaking. The train came to a halt in the Kamiooka station, the home of Beard Papa's cream puffs and Takano fruit parfaits. If I had to choose a place to be stuck for nine hours, the Kamiooka station would be at the top of my list.

But Kumi wasn't thinking about sweets. She had a wedding to attend. So she and most of the other passengers stayed on the train for about a half hour until an announcement informed them that service had been halted for the day. She eventually managed to reach her sister and niece by cell phone (service was disrupted for about a half hour) and learned that the wedding party was unable to get to the ceremony site. The wedding would have to be postponed.

Kumi then joined a long line of stranded train passengers in the taxi queue. There were only two taxicabs serving the Kamiooka station. Kumi waited nine hours until it was her turn to climb into a cab that would take her home to Yokosuka.

Nine hours is a long time. It was about midnight by the time she got a cab. She was very hungry and had some food in her tote bag but there were many elderly people in that queue with her and she did not have enough food to share with everyone. So she pretended she didn't have any food and just went hungry along with everyone else.

Her sister and niece spent the past week in the Tokyo apartment the bride and groom had planned to live in as newlyweds. Her sister is from Mito in Ibaraki Prefecture (where we saw the plum blossoms last month) and she must return to work in Mito or risk losing her job. Bus service between Tokyo and Mito has been restored in the past couple of days but Kumi says her sister is very afraid to return to Mito since that would put her closer to the nuclear plants.

I don't know how this will all turn out but I made another appointment with Kumi for April 10 and I will get the next installment then. Simply being allowed to make another appointment filled me with an enormous sense of relief. It's interesting how we all have different priorities, isn't it?

Morticia's Magical Mystery Tour

It would be such a shame to let my Smithsonian training go to waste so this week I introduced my new tour, "Let's Explore a Japanese Grocery Store!" My hairstylist, Kumi, earned a big tip for helping me weigh the relative merits of the grocery store in the Daiei Mall and the one in the basement of Seiyu Department Store. From now on, though, I'm not going to raise any thorny questions until AFTER Kumi rinses out the color, at least from my eyebrows.

The first tour was for two hospital spouses who arrived in Japan this summer just a few weeks before the Navy moved their sponsor to another country. "I need something called mirin for a recipe I want to try," one of them said as she glanced at a list in her leatherbound organizer. "There are several ways to find what you need in a Japanese grocery store," explained the tour guide. "Allow me to demonstrate my two favorite methods."

• Tour guide positions herself in the center of an aisle, gazes steadily at the fourth shelf, furrows brow, and scratches head. Tour guide expects a nice Japanese lady to ask if she needs help but they all trip over each other to vacate the aisle, murmuring something that sounds a lot like "Why is Morticia Addams staring at the soba noodles?"
• Tour guide approaches a clerk stocking nearby shelves. "Sumimasen, mirin? Mee-ren? Mere-en? My-reen?" The clerk leads tour guide and hospital spouses to another aisle and points out 17 different varieties of mirin which comes in a bottle and looks an awful lot like urine.

Having instilled confidence in her charges, tour guide wanders around the store looking for something to buy because the final module of her tour, the Grand Finale if you will, is "Paying for Your Purchases" which requires a prop or two. What better prop than a box of mushroom-shaped cookies? Back home, without an audience, she takes another look at the cookies she bought.

Hmmm. This box seems a little larger than the ones I usually buy. It IS larger!
Why are these pictures posted sideways? I have no idea. I also don't know why I can't type next to the pictures today. Just touch your left ear to your left shoulder and keep looking. Did you notice that the mushroom caps are both brown and white on the box above?

There sure are a lot of little pictures on the side of the box.

I think I bought a Make Your Own Mushroom-Shaped Cookie Kit! Those look like little vials of white and regular chocolate, a mold, a bag of cookie stems, and a box.

It looks like all I need to do is heat water to 50 degrees Centigrade. How hot is that? How would I know? I'm a Fahrenheit person. But there's a little cloud over the spout so let's assume we're supposed to boil some water. And we need a bowl and crayons. Why do we need crayons?

Elementary, my dear Watson. According to the directions on the back of the box, we need the crayons to color the little box that's inside this box.

This is really cool. When's your next tour?

Sorry, you missed it. I took two line spouses (line means regular Navy as opposed to doctors, dentists, lawyers, chaplains, and supply officers) on a tour Friday afternoon. One has lived in Japan for two years but (a) did not know there is a grocery store under Seiyu and (b) had never heard of mushroom-shaped cookies.

Un-be-lievable.