Yokohama Navy Exchange was where?

Lori, I finally found the article. It was of intrest quite a place. I went to Yokusuka a couple of times and stayed ofer there one night. My recollection is that it was kind of sad that all of the thousands of sailors that were put ashore at once had not a lot of options to have a genteel time. I am sure my thoughts were from the tunnel vision I had not being there a lot. I remember that a guy in our unit asked us if we wanted to go there and see a concert
was Sam and Dave [ soul man] I really wanted to go but my wife put the nix on it for some reason. Oh well.

I listened to the Armed Forces Radio Network all the time in Yokohama 1967-68. I still recall one Saturday morning where the announcer said "It is now 8:00 o'clock a.m. For Navy personnel it is 8 bells; For Army and Air Force personnel it is 0800; and for all you Marines, the little hand is on the 8 and the big hand is on the 12." I almost fell off my futon laughing. We didn't have Armed Forces Television then, but every Sunday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. a Japanese station carried the Andy Williams show which we got in the NCO Club.

We had a tv when we moved to our apartment on Medori Gaoka but only got japanese programs and never saw any "US" tv. We didn't watch it much cuz we seemed to be doing other things but when we did it was a great way to help learn the language. Well not to learn but to become more familiar with the sound of it. Remember that I had weekend duty which ment I could be on call at home so watched TV all weekend except when I had to go in. The sumo games were on so got fascenated in that. These matches would take a lot longer than I thought they might. Hey Wall where you from if you don't mind? Hope Kaoru san is still out there .

The announcer in Tokyo would say, "This is the Far East network," then he would say "Far East Network, Tokyo" (or Sendai or Misawa, etc) depending on what frequency you were listening to. FEN/Tokyo was 810 on the AM dial. I could pick up Sendai faintly at another dial position.
After school, FEN ran old radio serials like the Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid, etc from the 1940s & 50s. At night between music shows, they would broadcast "The Shadow" and "Inner Sanctom" scary mysteries.
Television in the 50s and early 60s was almost exclusively Japanese except for an occasional American movie on Sunday afternoon. The Stars and Stripes newspaper would put a notice in the paper that an American or English movie was going to be broadcast on NHK. All the Superman and Gunsmoke TV episodes were dubbed in Japanese, with the weekly exception of the Perry Como Show. Everything stopped at 6pm Sunday night for Perry Como.
A kid in my class at YIS, when asked why he hadn't done his weekend homework, mentioned that he had to catch Perry Como. It was unAmerican to miss it.

Eric how do you remember all the details of this ? Even the frequencies ! If I had read the stars & Stripes I would have known about the TV show. That would have been nice. We did have the Bill Chickering.

The name Bill Chickering was on the building until the Navy took over from the Army in '59. They took the name off and it became part of the Navy theater system and had no name. The Saturday morning kids movies (a continuing serial and an old western) were canceled. Horrors!
Then, in the mid 60s, when the Army came back to Yokohama, the name came back. I do not know what provoked this but its an interesting tidbit of Yokohama lore.

accross from the theatre complex was area 1 there was the seaside club, the Navy Dispensery and dental in back and next to this was a small wooden building that held the "headquarters" of the USAVDJ Yokohama Branch my old outfit. The whole building was no larger than
50x30 and held about 6 desks.
This was within walking distance to Bayside Courts.
Shortly after my arrival the dental department chose to remove my wisdom teeth. It took over 2 hours and I believe now that this was nearly a first for the young navy dentist. My jaw was swolen and I was bleeding badly as I hailed a Japanese taxi to go to my apartment near chinatown. What a scene! Trying to give him directions in a language I couldn't speak . he looked at me wondering I suppose if i had done something wrong and had been beaten up for it
I remember by the time I got there I was in tough shape and heaved bills at him. I wonder what he told his family that night. Never went back to the dental office to have the other two out. Just regular visits. Their policy.. miss an appointment and your cancelled. ie no other appointments. Also remember they called me from Kishine to get my shots updated. Because it was all the way accross town I got them all at once, typhoid, colera ect.. man was i sick, still had to work the next day. Had a whopping fever. I love Yokohama.. good times.

Area 1 was an easy walk and on the same side of Ave D as our house and the Ten Yen Store. I could walk past the empty lots, the toy store, book store and then see the chain link fence that divided the Military area from most Japanese.
I could climb this fence and either go to little league baseball practice, go swimming in the Olympic pool, or keep an appointment at the Dispensary, the medical/dental clinic.
My first encounter with a dentist was here and the guy suggested I get braces, which I did, from a Japanese dentist.
When I was about ten or 11, I stepped on a nail in one of the vacat lots near 91 Sannotani and this brought about daily Dispensary visits. I heard all sorts of worries about lockjaw or other diseases related to the nail puncture and ended up taking a hypo in the hip, every day for three weeks. You'd thought it was rabies...
I was so sore after this.

I see on Google earth that the area in question the Dispensary is a vacant lot. This is surprising in light of the new shopping center. Accross the street from area1 on what was ave A there was alittle bar, don't remember the name. It was the smallest place with 3 places at the bar and two tables and a jutebox. Above was a taylor that some of the guys used to make new suits for?? $20? He would come to Bayside Courts and fit them personally, he was called Hong Kong taylor. What a snappy dresser. In those days I favored the fronteer look. cowboy boots and deerskin jackets. I guess we kind of stood out. The Japanese people we met were not shy about asking our ages, this happened a lot. I was 21 at the time. It seemed that they had problems guesing our age. Odd, perhaps was a cultural thing. Perhaps that I was young and married. Still don't know really. Every Japanese person we met wanted to know where we were from in the states. We were flattered. some people acknowleged that they knew where we were from [Massachusetts] others I think pretended to know and really didn't but couldn't say so. Everyone knew New York City so we used this as a reference.

Ouch!! The shots in the hip for three weeks does indeed sound like rabies post exposure. I suspect that your family perhaps did not completely buy the nail story and as a precaution you received rabies shots. Except that I believe Japan is Rabies free and at the time the post exposure shots [duck embryo] were given in the belly. Perhaps this is an antibiotic protocal but it seems like a harsh one. Or gamma gobulin. also I would assume that we all had tetanus shots before going abroad.

I got all my shots the first time we went overseas. This was 1951. I was three years old.
We went back and forth in '55, which required another series of shots and updates.
Back and forth again in '58 and more shots.
I think I may have been the most inoculated pre-teen in the US...

Eric how come you went back and forth ? This was also by ship if I recall correctly. The Randall? In 1967 I reported to Oakland Army terminal. We had a roll call each day and people shipped out except for me it seemed. after about 5 days I decided that if I was not called i would check in to see if they knew i was there. Yup I was called. for the 5 days they provided nothing except a day room that was overcrowded. I would have loved some activity or a lecture on Japan. They bussed us to Travers AFB and set us up in a huge hanger full of army double decker bunks. 4 hours later we were loaded into a plane run by some private company I never heard of. It was a long flight and I don't remember if it was a jet or prop plane. Stopover in Ancorage which was surprisingly primative. About an hour from landing they released some disinfectant thru the plane, then out of the port side window there was Mt. Fuji far below. Many of the guys scrambled to see it and I remembered that most of these guys were still heading furthur south. I was lucky. On the way back in 69 we left Tachikawa and refuled at Wake island in the middle of the night. There was a small display in the terminal that explaned the battle and history of wake but mostly I remember that cokes were 2 bucks! we were used to 50 cent cokes. Refuled in Hawaii and spent 45 minutes at the airport what a paridise. thought why am I leaving here ?

Our back and forth travel via MSTS was due to family issues. Also, back in '55, there were numerous demonstrations and my dad was concerned about our safety in Sagami. I think we were Stateside for only a few months each time.
We shipped out on the Randall, the Mann, both Patricks and one other ship I've lost track of. Each passage took two weeks and embarked from Seattle. Our last return trip stopped for a day in Hawaii and we got off the ship and took a tour. This time we came into Oakland, bought a new station wagon from Lane Buick dealership and drove home.

Following are MSTS ships I sailed on 1951-1961;

General William O. Darby
General Edwin D. Patrick
General Mason M. Patrick
General George M. Randall
General W. A. Mann
(six trips on five ships)

Another ship, the General Daniel I Sultan, was in the same Yokohama-Seattle service but we never sailed on this ship.
One of the above was said to have broken in half and sank but was refloated, welded back together for additional years of service.
Many of these served in Korea and earlier campaigns as troop ships exclusively.

Eric you did get around, what wonderful memories. Ever get sea sick? My wife joined me about a month after I arrived. Strange twist of events there . She was scheduled to come in and I went to the airport to pick her up bt she never arrived. As I recall she missed her flight or there was some miscommunication. A few days later the Red cross called me to tell me that her father had died on the last day of his teaching profession. If she had been on the flight scheduled she would have arrived shortly before his death and would have perhaps had to turn around and return home. As it turned out she attended the funeral and was taken the next day to the airport and 20 hours later she was in Yokohama. How strange. As I was a private this was of course all on us, no military assistance. They also required that she have a round trip ticket and/or the funds to return on her own. The round trip ticket as I recall was about a thousand dollars. All the money we had. she returned back to stay with her brother who was in the air force in California. I moved back to Bayside courts for the last couple of weeks. I was anxious to get home but mixed with having to leave such a wonderful country and the people we had come to know and love. regret that my outfit didn't have the hail and fairwell parties that other groups did. Did you see the photos of the guys at Kamiseya ? they knew how to party. Question.. did you pick up Japanese from the other kids in your neighborhood ? Often young people do that. There wasa couple that had a Japanese nanny and spoke to the Child in Japanese, The child was speaking japanese as well as english. Dad was a little concerned that the childs language skills were set back because of that. Still cold in New Hampshire and still large snowbanks . Dispite that I broke out the old rake and went at it at the exposed flower beds. I could buy a new car with what we paid for heating bills this year.. man! Happy Saint Paddys day.

Sorry to hear about your fierce heating bill. We put in a ground source heat pump & our power bill is less than $150/month. You should look into this technology...
Our maid, Masako helped me with learning Japanese and she also corrected my attempts at writing. Seems like most of my Japapanese characters looked like little houses.
The kids behind our house in the big apartment house played baseball (more like three fly's up) and I always joined in, which gave me some of the language associated with sports. They used a hard rubber ball rather than a true baseball, which was good because we had limited space. The kids always ran on gatas which never failed to amaze.
I was looking at the MSTS website and noticed one of the ships had brought Elvis Presley to his German duty station in '58 or so. From what I could tell, most of the ships are scrapped, with the exception of the General Edwin Patrick which is parked up north of San Francisco near the Iowa in the "reserve fleet."
Its interesting to look at the MSTS (formerly known as the Army's Navy) info on the Internet. Its easy to find and the histories of the generals that the ships were named for is fascinating. Some were renamed, some were in scrapes and had battle stars.
Akin to merchant vessels, they had civilian crews but had limits on the cargo they could carry. American merchant marine lines didn't want too much competition, even during war.

Our little apartment on Medori Gaoka had no heating. We had moved in in the summer and when winter came around i went looking for the thermostat, couldn't find it ..was not there.So I looked for the baseboardheaters..none..ducts none raidiators none. came to understand that a thousand years ago the japanese decided to be cool in summer or warm in winter, chose the former. Bought two keroscscene heaters and one electric, got us through. Will research heat pumps but believe they are not used in new england as are not efficient. Many people starting to use pellet stoves and all fuel furnaces. these are placed outside the home. One guy i used to know had one underground at the end of his driveway and stored about three cords of wood and he would burn pine or anything .had a stovepipe that was 1/4 inch thick and removeable in the spring the whole thing was invisable from above ground and had a steel fire door between the basement and the furnace room. He never purchased any oil. Perhaps the heat pumps work better furthur south, where are you? I have burned wood and coal and loved it. Japan is perfect for geothermal heat. In Yokohama we had a "on demand" water heater. My dad said that they were not allowed in the US because they were too efficient and the big oil companys lobbied against them. turn on the tap and whoof the gas went on as long as you needed it. Not efficient when running but very good overall. I did not hear if the MSTS ships were running in mid 60's. Seems everyone moved around by plane. I had a pair of geta made for me on honmuku dori and still have them. They were hard to get used to but after a while it seemed to work. The Japanese truck drivers who delivered the food we inspected seemed to all wear rubber flip-flops. seemed pretty tough on the feet driving truck, but it worked for them. We would check the trucks for proper temperature and to make sure the refrig units were up to speed. They had clever ways around us. One guy put his thermometer on top of a small block of dry ice. when I pulled out the thermometer it read something like 70 degrees below zero. samuai!! Busted. we all laughed at how "good" his refer unit was. Then he had to wait until a proper reading rendered the true temp. Our first summer in Yokohama was hot. Perhaps worse for us as we came from a cold climate. The hottest in 30 years or so my old letters say. We would take wet towels and lay down with them. Humid as well. At least you were close to the large pool in area 1 . Was almost too far for us. Looked on google earth and the pool does not seem to be there. Heard that one guy in our unit exposed himself to a child at the pool.. puff..gone within an hour I was told went to Sagami Depot, which then i thought was the equivilent of outer mongolia.

Our house in Yokohama had a kerosene stove in the living room. A three wheeled truck would pull up and the driver and a helper would lift the 55 gallon drum of kero up on a wooden cradle, then hook up a copper line. We started the stove with newspapers and I think there was a little fan to blow the heat around the house.
We live in Missouri and our ground source has four 200 foot wells under the driveway. Its a sealed system with antifreeze, bringing ground heat 0f 59 F into the heat exchanger, which is bumped by electricity. They are in use in cold climates like Iowa and Minnesota, so I don't know why they wouldn't work where you are. The system is supposedly 300 percent efficient...

I recall that some of the houses in area 1 had that oil drum arrangement. A house next to our apartment had a solar hot water heater on the roof I wanted to talk to them about it but was too shy about the language barrier. Stayed with a friend at his parents home I believe in Satayame they had a landscaping business and a little land. the ofuro was the tipical wooden Japanese bath and was fired with a cute little boiler located in a small room behind the house. They would gather some sticks and fire up the boiler and give 100 turns on the circulater pump made nice hot water I was amazed that so little effort went into the preperation. After our geta discussion i went and dug mine up. They still had the labels on them. Made By Sakikibara, Honmuku I don't know what type of wood they are made of. Perhaps someone does? Light and durable. Don't know if ny size 9 1/2 is large for Japanese or not. When the weather gets better I will try them out. They are a little worn, especially on the front block. Dont remember how much they were perhaps 3000yen. 10 dollars.
We also had zabutons or flat pillows made. Has a Japanese table that later made a large coffee table. About 24'' square and we chose a bright red and gold design. As I recall there was much discussion as to the fabric and such. There small shops on Honmuku were little larger than 10 by 10 and it seemed to have quarters for the family in the back. There was one that I loved and featured just Japanese style "mugs" or chawan used them everyday but now most are in the china cabinet as prized objects D'art. By the time my stay was up the Army allowed me st ship stuff back on them. I didin't think we had ammased that much stuff but it filled a truck sized crate. Some people went on a shopping spree the week before the crew was to pack them up and bought habachis and statues and other heavy and bulky stuff that filled their apartment. the crew was suposed to pack everything for you but as we found out they heaved stuff into the crates with not much regard for things. Doing this again I would have boxed up everything and had them pack the pre-boxed containers. My father was shocked when this large truck rolled up at his house three months later. It wasn't that much. I never saw the three wheeled type vehicles that you mentioned and I have seen in photos. By 1967 I guess they had lost favor in the cities. There were some clever farm type "tractors that looked like that but never got close enough to really see. Also saw rickshaws only once in Japan. In Yokohama on the edge of chinatown. Never saw them even in Kyoto and never in use. My impression is that they were used as a novelty like horse drawn carrages are used today in some cities. I thought of getting a scooter or motorcycle to get aroung town but never did. Things like parking, insurance licence and selling it seemed to much of a hassle. Taxis were 100-200 yen less than 50 cents so why bother. As stated the Japanese drivers seemed crazy but it worked for them. Plus I was not sure if I was allowed to drive. We were trying to keep things simple and with the army there was plenty of paperwork and complications. Looking into heat pumps thanks for the lead. Why is this not well known around here.

In case you haven't already thought of these sources of info, try Wikipedia and ask.com for info/explanations of a heat pump system. I know of people who have them in their homes here in the Pacific Northwest, but only have a general idea of how they work. So I wouldn't try to explain them.