yokohama...

We arrived this morning in Yokohama and were greeted by about 40 people, some of whom were our own students who had travelled independently from Kobe. The fellow in red in the photo walked up and down the pathway waving his US and Japanese flags and shouting "Welcome to Yokohama". Those are three of our students standing to his left.

I expected Yokohama to be much more industrial, but the port area is quite nice and John and I got off the ship to find a place to have coffee. In the end we decided not to spend the short time we have here looking for the area where I was born. Research I have done had shown that the nearby town, called Irumagawa, is now called Sayama, in the Saitama Prefecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayama,_Saitama. The base is now Iruma Air Base in Iruma, Saitama, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iruma,_Saitama and is run by the Japanese. Other sites I had found indicated it would be impossible to get on the base. I also spoke to our interport lecturer, a professor at university near here, and she was familiar with the area. She thought it would not be hard to get to, but wasn't sure that we would see anything there. She was born near there in 1952, a couple of years after I was. I enjoyed very much talking with her on the ship.

So, John and I decided to get a hotel in the area to have a bit of a break from the ship. We have a good view of the bay from our hotel room and can see the Explorer below. We also found that there were a couple of giant -- HUGE -- spiders in the port area below. There was fire and lots of noise, and we decided this was some sort of Japanese monster movie being filmed. However I did a search and found the following website http://pinktentacle.com/2009/04/giant-robot-spider-in-yokohama-pics-video/ that has a film of these mechanical spiders and explains that they will be used in celebrating the 150 year anniversary of the opening of Yokohama as a port. The place looks a fair bit different than it did even 60 years ago, right Mom?

We will be leaving tomorrow evening for the long sail to Hawaii. Great news -- Clark will be meeting us in Honolulu! It will be wonderful to see him on the 19th and 20th while we are in port there.