Thursday, May 24, 2012

Recently I was engaged in a discussion on "the most embarrassing moment of your life".  I can honestly say that I have over the course of my many years I've had many embarrassing moments, but one that sticks out in my mind as perhaps my most embarrassing moment came at the age of 12. 

At that time, our military family was stationed at Camp Zama, in the Sagamihara Prefecture, Japan. My brother (10) and I regularly took our allowance, caught a train outside our base and rode for 40 minutes to the regional shopping district for a day of fun and pachingco playing. One day, we arrived at the station to find a beautiful silver and blue train at the station. Not knowing any better and not being able to read or speak Japanese, we didn't realize that this was the wrong train.  Deciding that it was much more attractive than the regular brown rickety trains we were used to, we hopped on to ride this pretty train. Turned out that this was the fabled 120 MPH bullet train and in the normal 40 minutes, we were deposited in the main train terminal in downtown Tokyo. Suffice to say, this was a rather other worldly experience kind of akin to Dorothy landing in Oz. We found ourselves ambling about Tokyo in fear, awe and wonder about our predicament. We couldn't get help from the Japanese because Japanese of 1966 did not speak English and we didn't speak Japanese.  As we wondered about trying to decide what to to, we came across a beautifully manicured park and wandered up to a small river to sit and discuss our predicament. No sooner had we sat down than a flock of black swans came swimming down the river, raced out of the water and attacked us. As one started grabbing at my brothers red sweater, I picked up a large (for me) stick and started to beat the swans. 

The commotion caused an uproar and we were soon surrounded by a bunch of Japanese officials screaming at us in a language we could not understand. We were taken to a police station, the US embassy was called and an interpreter arrived to determine how two young American kids could be wandering around downtown Tokyo causing such a commotion. 

Turns out that we had wandered onto the grounds of the Imperial Palace, the "river" was the surrounding moat and the swans were the protectors of the moat and were sacred. We caused an international incident and endless embarrassment to my father who had to drive more than 50 miles to come recover us from the clutches of the angry Japanese. I don't think either of us were able to sit for a week and we were never again allowed to ride the train.