The Summer When I was 13, Tokyo, 1994, by Mandy Davis

From MemoryArchive

Who: Mandy Davis
What: The Summer When I was 13
When: 1994
Where: Tokyo, Japan

One of my friends invited me to travel from Ketchikan, Alaska to Tokyo, Japan to spend the summer with her. My mom had gone to college with her mother, who had later married a Japanese man who was in some high-up position at Kodak, and her parents let her choose one friend that summer who spoke English to come and spend the summer with her, I suppose to help her practice her English. She choose me. We lived a little way out of the downtown area in a 4 or 5 bedroom townhouse, complete with a garage and a loft where her brother slept and we snuck into to look at his manga books. I hadn't really seen a real city up to this point (Seattle seemed enormous) but adapted well to Tokyo. What I remember: Choosing people, mainly cute boys with blue hair, to follow in the subway and them following them in and out of stations, into record stores (this was the summer that Three Weddings and a Funeral came out) and listing to the theme song of that movie. Emiko had a couple of copies of different NOW: Hot Music! tapes as well, so we'd split the headphones on her walkman and listen while walking through the city. I remember in particualar finding a swing set in the middle of an industrial area and swinging with Emiko while cars were driving by and tall skyscrapers loomed above us.

Then we went on a vacation with some family friends of theirs who wanted me to speak "American English" to their son. I obliged. Rad. Awesome. We went to the sea shore and stayed in a little condo. I had the worst sunburn of my life, and still had scars. It happened in the condo swimming pool. One night we had a wonderful meal of shabu-shabu, in a resturant next to a noisy pakincho paralor -- Kobe beef swished with chopsticks, in a simmering stock that later had rice poured in it to make a sweet savory rice broth. The father of the friends drank a lot of sake and I was terrified as we swirved around the hilly roads leading back to the condo. We returned to Tokyo on the shinkonzen, the speedy train, and drank grape sac juice with whole peeled grapes inside the can. Then, back to our life of buying candy at the corner store that would have different colored candies that meant you sometimes won more candies, and following people through the subway.