One Judge-Ito Burrito Please

After Sumo, the plan was to climb Mt. Fuji and get to the top for the sunrise. We bumped into a few SAS girls in Tokyo station who had just attempted it and gotten stuck in a huge storm. They strongly recommended that we don’t do it, so with out any plans we pulled out a map. We found a small village called Ito on the Izu peninsula and decided to go there. We got off the train around midnight, and the train station closed up behind us. There was a very warm tropical breeze, and the town was completely dark and dead silent. We walked down the beach looking for a place to sleep, but every hotel told us they were full. The language barrier was more like a concrete wall. Nobody spoke a single word of English. After wandering around for a while with no luck, we found a guy and a girl on the street, and they motioned for us to follow them. The walked us all over town, to all the hotels that had already rejected us, and then finally found one that had vacancy. The hotel would be about 210 bucks, and between the six of us we only had about 150. That was pretty lame of us to have no money, but the ATM’s would not take our cards. We admitted defeat, and tried to explain to our new friends that we were done looking. They had walked with us for over an hour, and they really wanted to help us. It made us feel really bad, nobody in the states would ever in a million years go out of their way for us, let alone a group of foreigners. We were all really touched by how kind they were. I still had the bottle of gin in my backpack, so as a thank you, I gave it to them as a present. I could tell it meant a lot to them. It was a pretty heart-wrenching situation, since we couldn’t communicate, and things didn’t work out.

We started wandering back up the beach. We found a dirty little hole in the wall place that was open, and we went in. The three chefs got a real kick out of us. The big menu on the wall was all in Japanese, so we pointed to a few random dishes, and they went to work. We ate like there was no tomorrow.

Back on the street, it was almost 2, and I needed some rest. The others said they were going to keep wandering, so I told them I was going to sleep on the beach, and for them to come get me in the morning. The wind was ripping pretty hard, so I tucked in between two beached rowboats and slowly fell to sleep. I woke up completely startled to the loud crack of a tarp in the wind. I didn’t know were I was for a second and it was really scary. The wind was really ripping now, and I was so freaked that I just got up and started walking. It was well past three. I came up to a telephone booth and tried fruitlessly to call home a few times, and idiotically I managed to get the Ito police on the phone somehow.

I hung up and kept walking, and I came around a corner to see my friends all sprawled out sleeping on the sidewalk just as a cop car rolls up, probably responding to my call. I completely froze, thinking we were going be arrested, and then my next reaction was to snap a picture of the scene. The cops seemed confused and after a few seconds, they just kept rolling. The picture didn’t come out.

We got up and walked back up to the train station to get some shelter from the wind. We slept outside on the concrete and the few benches we could find. There were a few homeless people around. The guy directly across the lockers from me was in a squatting position, with his face in his hands, not moving at all. He may have been coming down off of some drugs, but I could feel his pain. You don’t sleep on the street; you can only quiet yourself and wait for the sun to come up. Even though I had to go all the way to Japan to experience life as a homeless, it was an interesting experience.

Feeling pretty crappy around five, we headed back down to the beach. The sunrise was quite beautiful. On the top floor of a hotel across the street we noticed a completely naked man standing in the window. He was smashing his dead rat against the glass and I’m certain he was thinking something to the effect of “Ito, you are my bitch.” We found a park that had nice grass and all sorts of interesting sculptures. After some amateur sumo wrestling, we all sprawled out on the grass and passed out until nine.

We went to a bank to exchange some currency, brushed our teeth and shaved in the bathroom, and got some lunch. Ito was super low-key, and much quieter than what we were used to in Tokyo. After food and some Tums, we hopped on the train and B-lined it out of there.