Yokohama Navy Exchange was where?

Peter,
We were there March 1953 thru May 1954. I was in the 4th and 5th grades at the time. Dad was logistics officer for Port of Yokohama, but was primarily focused on military dependent household goods and stuff with all the military dependents coming and going back in that era

Pete, I was an Army Medic, Spec. 4, at the 106th Army Hospital, Yokohama, from Jan 67 through Aug 68. I used to hang out at the Peanuts Club. It was the best place and had some great rock bands. I also hung out at the Zebra Club, and the VFW. Those were great times. The Peanuts Club was still there in 1971-72, but was no longer there in 1979-80. I was assistant to the Chief Nurse in 67-68 and remember meeting a couple of meat inspectors, and one of them could have been you. I vaguely remember it because I remember thinking at the time that is sounded like a great field to be in!

Wally YES the 106 th. If memory serves me it was on the north side of yokohama on a hill, to the right as you go up the hill Thank you for the Peanuts information. I have been wondering. We had some good friends that we met there a rock band called the Voltage. Pretty shy guys for a band we did a lot with them and have some photos from inside the peanuts bar. I do not think that we had met then because I was not a meat inspector. I had two stations. One at the Meadow Gold milk plant which was just north of north pier towards Kawasaki and Center Pier Just north of yamashita Park [ Zebra club] It was fantastic duty! Inspected fresh fruits and vegetables mostly, plus frozen foods from the states and checked trucks and ships . I just stumbeled onto it.
Comming out of collage I knew that I would be drafted and a friend of my fathers who was in ww2 told me to enlist as a food inspector. So i went to the recruting office and the sargent didn't know that they even has that MOS. He told me to come back, and the next day he signed me up as a food inspector [ pending my passing the class in Chicago, which I did. Food inspection was great. Every noon we had Organoleptic testing [ taste testing] which was authorized] there was one guy who's job it was to select the samples for the noon test so we had lunch every day! my buddy even was sent to Kawasaki to check on indegionious sources. which means local producers of stuff. One place he was ordrerd to inspect was the large Kirin Beer facility! can you believe it ! a spc 4 given 2 days to test beer! He told me that the inspection went well but he had to look the other way when it came to the supplies of sugar which came from Cuba which was a no no. The Japanese were very cooperative and he did his organoleptic duty. The plant was surrounded by a stone wall which was erected during ww2 and, dispite its size was never hit by bombs in ww2. Apparently there was an agreement with the B29 crews to avoid hiting the Kirin beer plant so that even at the start of the occupation they would be able to get some beer. The stone wall was perhaps a way to define where the plant was I do not think that there was any understanding or agreement afoot. I was Always wanting to do new things i volunteered to inspect eggs, Sounds like fun eh. Found myself in the basement of a warehouse in the dark for 4 months candeling eggs, hundreds of thousands of dozens. Another time I was called to the pier to sign off on a ship that was leaving, It had 20.000 cases of lettuce on it and the refrigeration system was not working that well. so i signed off on it and it left. Next day my top sargent commended me on my guts. I had no idea. He said that I had personally approved the shipment and that if the lettuce went bad I had to pay for it. Like a million dollars. I don't know if this was right or not but scared the hell out of me. WALLY where did you stay, Bayside Courts or at the 106th? I was there a fue times and saw some pretty banged up kids. I cant imagine what you must have gone through. good for you. Zebra club.. forget the prices like 25 cents for a mixed drink. I was newly married and my wife and I would go to the Zebra club. it was kind of strange for us as she was often the only american women there and the guys on R&R were starved to speak with an american women. So she spent much time talking with the guys and helping to make them feel at home. The Zebra club was huge and sat perhaps a thousand people. Once she lost a contact lense and the whole place came to a stop to help us find it. We were very touched at the kindness, especially with that most of these guys were going back to the jungles. Perhaps it was an effort to find courtesy, in a upsidown time.

You're going to be sorry you got me started at I spent eight years overseas, five in the Orient and three in Germany, but the time I spent in Yokohama was the best of all! I was a soldier in Yokohama, but the rest of the time I was a civilian with the Department of Defense. You're right about where the 106th was located, it was at Kishine Barracks. There wasn't enough barracks space for the enlisted men, so the old man let us live off post. I and several of my friends lived in Hakaraku Mansion, a Japanese apartment house near the hospital. There were several Army nurses living there too, and we partied all the time we weren't on duty, and we were working twelve hour days. My memory isn't as good as it used to be but the band Voltage rings a bell. My favorite band was Little Eva and the Espionage that used to play at the Zebra Club and the S&S Club in Tokyo. Several of us from the 106th would always stop in at the Peanuts Club, or was it singular, Peanut? I liked to sit in the balcony and watch all the action. Things in Japan were so cheap back then and I could make my E-4 pay almost last the month. Did you ever eat at the Chinese Restaurant, Tung Fats? In 1967 a seven course meal there cost three dollars. Last time I ate there, in 1980, my meal cost $35. There were 250 enlisted men and 97 nurses at the 106th and we were all pretty tight, but as far as I know there never was a reunion. Go figure!

YES Kishine Barracks NOW I have it. You ONLY worked 12 hour days lucky. Sounds like you were having a good time you were fortunate, as was I. My first apt was on the edge of chinatown itself and I got "pimped" comming home from work! There were a thousand chinese restaurants there and I believe that I did eat there with my parents when they came to visit The place was ornate
and beautiful. It was the day they were to fly home and we were having a chinese lunch and the time passed without our being aware. BOOM
we realized that we had one hour to get them on a filght to hawaii. grabed a cab and my dad gave the driver a 10,000 yen tip to get us to the airport on time can you imagine that ride... wild they got on the plane in tokyo with 15 min to spare. The bar was called PEANUTS [plural] how do you know when it closed? Dont remember Little eva. I later learned that peanuts some how or other got on a list of "seamans" bars so we ran into a lot of sailors there.merchant sailors. There was also a place called ZEN which was accorss from yokohama station it was a huge gym like place where people mostly danced with themselves a little strange. My pfc pay was as much as my first apartment about 60.000 yen so we stayed there about 3 months before moving to our Manzaka Mansion much cheaper at 30,000 a month. food was so cheap I recall that we stocked up on groceries and cooked at home before we figured out that we could eat cheaper going out every night than to cook. so we only cooked or had sandwitches when it was raining. Needless to say we found a lot of neat places. near to the base on ave D there was tis little shop that served noodles and other stuff. At that time being new to the country I asked the waitress to bring me something that the americans liked she brought be an order of GAO-ZA man I thought I had gove to heaven, Being from New England I had no idea that there was food this good . Another favorite was katsu-don.Which is a deep fried pork cutlette over rice with this sauce, for whatever 300 yen.? We had three japanese guys that lived next to us and it was there mission to show us all of the japanese style dishes and more... [ also to try and figure out who we were, more on that another time, really interesting] We went to this one place in Yokohame that had all deep fied dishes The building was set in several balconys aroung a huge cooking pot in the center which must have contained 300 gal of boiling fat[ oh my heart] the waitor would take your order and cook it himself in this huge pot and that was all there was. We traveled a lot and my wife worked as a teacher so we did pretty well and set some ambitious goals for ourselves. We wanted to be the first americans to go to some places and in some cases we were. Did you do any traveling? Kyoto? Nikko?
We had a ball. All thanks to our friendly base travel guide/conceirge Hidumitsu Shibanguchi or Mr. Green we called him who spoke better english than some of the guys in my outfit. Albeit with a heavy australian accent. he set us up with a plan for our trips base on our emerging ability with japanese which we tore into with a passion. One day after being there for two years it all"clicked" and the japanese translator at our little inspection station smiled and said "Peter san" you have been here two years,today it makes sence ne? You are about a year ahead of others. A huge complement. that night I told my wife and as a treat we spoke japanese to each other in conversation all night . can't do that now. Hey do this, go on to you tube and search yokohama isezaki-cho you will find 2 walking tours. no peanuts. 250 enlisted at Kishini? i never realized it was that big! our food inspectopn unit has about 12 in it. Sorry,,,no not sorry to get you started.
7/23/07 may be away for a day or two will try and check in. Thanks

You guys are doing a great job filling in the blanks for the years following our exit from Japan. Its curious that the Army had so much going on in Yokohama after the Navy took over from the Army in 59.
My dad worked for the Army's Japan Procurement Agency, buying big stuff for the Army and Air Force in the Far East. He bought steel in Japan and Korea, newsprint and similar paper products in Se Asia and the PI. And he and his fellow DACs practically created the Isuzu Motors that exists today, via a contract for Duce and a half trucks that were exact duplicates of one 1949 Dodge they loaned to Isuzu for copying.
By the end of the 1950s, its doubtful someone from the west had not ventured into every small town and village in Japan. Americans were a novelty in little communities and more than a few times Japanese kids would examine my white blonde hair and ask why my hair was "old."
A friend of the family, Robert Lang of Kamakura, was a commercial photographer and I got to go with him on his "shoots" which were made into short educational films or film strips. I visited silk worm farms, tea leaf farms and other places that are a rare or gone from today's modern Japan.
In the Yokohama Chinatown of our era, there was a restaurant called "Forbidden City," that we frequented. Just wondering if this is still there. I remember the Zebra Club and the EM Club and a few times we had dinner at the US Embassy with the upper reaches of the US DOD.
Dad was a non-drinker but he would order a mineral water with an olive and walk around with it to be sociable.
He was in the Shriners, a member of the Tori-Oasis Shrine Club and Sinim Lodge in Tokyo. One of the most difficult things to explain to the Japanese was the annual Shrine parade and picknick where usually sane Americans would dress up like Arabs...

Regards,

Thanks eric I myself worked for the army procurement agency for about a month while the major there was on leave. was the veterinary liason but I really didn't quite know what i was doing. Bldg was about 2 blocks behind the zebra club. Went to a small inn, in a town forget the name but have it somewhere where we were the first americans. It was set up especially that way as part of our cultural experiment. this was toward the end of our stay there and spoke pretty fair japanese. Got to the inn and the owners were a little nervous and said to us [ all in japanese] "we dont know if we will understand each other " I said well ,lets see how it goes, they said , were worried that you will not be happy or are able to communicate , I said well we are doing pretty well so far! they realized that we had been carrying on a japanese conversation about the ability to communicate in japanese. we all had a big laugh. Also went to ainu villages up north. Probably were not the first there . very interesting never got to any silk farms or tea plantations

I had been to almost all the Japanese Islands but never up north to see the Ainu people. I did note the people in the far south spoke a different dialect than the Honshu variety.
Dad's first assignment was at YED at Camp Zama as an inspector. We lived at Sagamihara during those years. Sagami in the early 50s was a mostly barren, bombed out empty field with many very poor Japanese eeking out a living.
It was about this time that Dad and his friends found out about the orphanages of old people located out in the countryside. These were old folks who had lost their sons in the war and had no extended families to live with or grandchildren to take care of. The Japanese government had put up the living quarters but no charcoal and little food was provided. A couple of these "orphanages" were adopted by the Shrine Club. No doubt these people are gone by now.
It was a mystery why the Japanese government didn't do more for their veterans. I observed many war vets, dressed in starched white uniforms, playing musical instruments and signing old songs, while begging for money in front of religious and national shrines. Most were amputees or had other less obvious injuries. They were at the intry to the Buddha statue in Kamakura every time I visited this city.

The Vietnam War brought several Army units back to Japan and in 1965 the 106th Field Hospital was airlifted from Ft. Bliss Texas and installed as a 1,000 bed Army General Hospital at Kishine Barracks, which had previously been an R&R center. We were in direct support of Vietnam. A wounded soldier was choppered from the battlefield, put on an Air Force jet to Yokota AB, and choppered to Kishine Barracks. He went from the battlefield to a bed at the 106th in just a few hours. There was a very high rate of survivability. Army Chief Nurse Rita Geise and NCOIC Sgt. Pardito were the two ramrods that set all of this up. They are two heroes you never hear about, but who had a direct hand in saving thousands of soldiers' lives. By the way, LTC Geise was the nurse in charge of med facilities at President Kennedy's funeral. You mentioned your Dad was in Army procurement. I am a retired Contracting Officer, DAC. Instead of procurement the government now calls it contracting. Everyone knew what procurement meant so the gov had to change it to contracting in order to obfuscate it.

There were a couple of procurement scandals that were mostly covered up but led to the folks involved being sent home and cut from civil service. I suppose there was so much opportunity for graft, it was hard to stay clean for some.
Dad had been a civilian pilot in the China-Burma-India Campaign. He was an old timer, born in 1906 and was a little too old to step forward in 42. He flew C-46s over the Hump and many of these guys became DAC retreds for the Korean War. I think many of them just loved Asia and didn't want to go home. They were kings in Japan in those days, so why not find a way to stay there?
I was in college during the Viet Nam War and damned glad to have the deferrment. The last year (my 5th year of a 4 year program) I was 1-A and went into the lottery. By 1972, it was mostly over and I didn't have to even take a physical.

you have got to get a reunion togrther for the 106th there must be gobs of folks out there. GOD what you guys did! I am so proud of you . Thank you !!

My father was stationed there 1965-68. He worked at Totsuka, and we lived in Area X across from the Grandstand on Race Track Road. We could see Mt Fuji from the end of our driveway. My father was an avid bowler, and played on a softball team. He passed away awhile ago...details of our time there are lacking. I recall trips to D Avenue, a toy store called Shin Se (sp?) and a flower store where a myna bird said "ten yen for flowers!" Saw movies at the Bill Chickering Theater, and shopped at the Navy Exchange. Anyone familiar with any of the places I mentioned?

When Yokohama was an Army town, the theater in the PX complex was "the Bill Chickering." In 1959, the Navy took over and all the Army names came down and Navy names went up except at the theater. The theater had no name for several years, then "Bill Chickering" came back. I'm not sure why this happened but it was around 1965 that the name returned.
Chickering was a war correspondent, I believe, for Time/Life. Someone correct me if I've got this wrong...
Thanks,

Hi, Eric. You are right--Bill Chickering was a Time war correspondent. See below for what I found on-line:

"In January 1945 twenty-eight-year-old William Chickering, who had been covering MacArthur's campaigns from New Guinea to Leyte, became the first and only Time Inc. correspondent to be killed in battle during World War II. He was standing on the bridge of the New Mexico watching the bombardment that preceded the landing on Luzon when his ship was hit by a kamikaze attack."

Are you familiar with Area X across from the Grandstand? Before a house became available there, we stayed at Bayside Courts. I went to Byrd Elementary School.

Yes, I remember Area X. I had many friends who lived there including the Gordon kids. My dad had a pal who owned German Shepards there and we got one of the puppies and named her Bonnie. Bonnie accompanied us on our final trip home on the MSTS ship, General W. A. Mann. There was a kenel on the fantail, a stack of cages, really, where dependents' dogs were quartered for the 14 day trip across the Pacific. My assignment was to visit her everyday, walk her and get her moving, clean out the pen, and put her back inside. I think the dog was seasick 13 out of 14 days.
I think most if not all the MSTS ships have been scrapped by now. A few were used into the 60s.
I made six crossings, back and forth, 1951-1961 and I think I was sea sick one time.

On the yohi devils web site there is a photo of the bill chickering and the navy exchange. from the cars looks like it was taken in the early 60's. there is a large caddy in the foreground. I don't know how that tank would be to drive on the then small japanese streets. Speaking of cars i learned that some enterprising folks would buy a new car in california and have the goverment ship it over and they would resel it on the japanese market and make a huge profit as the import taxes were about equil to the total price of the car. Can anyone confirm this? Also are there any photos available of bayside courts?

Pete, The Bill Chickering Theater was there during my tour 67-68. I have a slide of it somewhere. Also, the gov would ship your personal vehicle overseas free, but you couldn't sell it for at least a year after you arrived in country. Or, it may have been two years, I forgot. If you bought a new car overseas the gov would ship it home free. And you couldn't sell it for one year after you got it home.

Thanks for the clarification. I would not think that it would have been as easy as that. However all a person would have to do would be to park the car for a year. Also recall hearing that all of the headlights would have to be changed as they were too bright for the japanese conditions. Have been thinking about Kishine what a wonderful book or movie that would make sounds like a cross between MASH and China Beach. Do you ever hear from any of the people you used to know back then?
I reciently found a guy in my old outfit Veterinary Detachment Yokohama Branch. And after a year got to see him lived only about three hours away. Strange and wonderful! He was from Woodstock NY and was rightly pissed that the biggest rock concert in the history of the world was going on in his backyard and he was "stuck" inspecting vegetables in Yokohama, 10 thousand miles away.

From what I remember, NCOs and up could have personal vehicles shipped to and from Japan at government expense. As far as I know there were no restrictions on selling used vehicles within the military. I remember my dad picked up a nice Plymouth Belvedere when we lived in Yokohama from another NCO because the guy was leary of driving on the left.
The headlights did have to be changed due to driving on the left, opposing traffic would flash their high beams at us after we returned stateside with the Japanese spec headlights.

PS the street cars were being removed when we lived on West Bluff in 70-71.
We lived at the intersection where 4 or 5 roads met, right over the ave D tunnel.
We were one of the last families to leave before the military housing there was turned over to the Japanese government.