Yokohama Navy Exchange was where?

I'm sure glad you are back, I worried about you! Hope you continue to improve. I noticed that your spelling is a lot better!

Thanks Wally, your thoughts were appreciated..hopefully as I continue to make progress my faculties will get back to normal and my spelling will revert to its post surgical norm. Unless they fixed something they haven't told me about. !?
Was that our old friend Kaoru? that I saw?

Yes, I'm Kaoru.

I often saw this site. And, worried about your heart attack. I remember your blog "Last night of Matsusima" well. I did the posting to the picture of Bund hotel. Are you still collecting old works of art of Japan?

Arigatou.

I'm sorry I made a mistake in the spelling of your name. I am careless. The cold has a bad influence for the heart. Please warm and take the rest. I was not able to find him though I looked for Chibita several times.

I went to around Manzaka near Midorigaoka high school. There are new, big apartments. The area is a high-end residential of Yokohama now.

Hey Kaoru..as you may know I do not worry much about spelling. So nice to hear from you again. Are we "heart brothers" ? I had a 6 way by-pass as you may know. I am not collecting Japanese antiques much anymore, I have been a little busy lately. And thanks for looking for "Chibita" this was a nickname I believe. Also I went on Google earth and saw the new Medori Gaoka homes, much nicer than my old apartment ne.?

Peter;
Glad you are fully bypassed, up and out of the hospital. A friend locally said the removal of veins for the bypass was more painful than the heart surgery. Glad to take his word for it.
My dad suffered a heart attack when we lived in Yokohama in '59 and spent 6 weeks in the Navy Hospital at Yokosuka. He was a smoker and my mom brought a couple of packs of Camels to the hospital on a visit. He asked the doctor if he could light up in the hospital room and the Doc said, sure, just as soon as they moved the oxygen tanks out.
The trick was on Dad; they never moved the tanks and pretty soon, he caught on.

Thanks for the kind thoughts. The graft sites aren't that bad, but there are a lot of them. Try and not have a heart attack, its not a lot of fun. Thanks for your story about your dad. Pretty funny if it wasn't so serious.

I've been watching the WW II in color series running this week on the History Channel and was reminded of how many of the Greatest Generation were smokers.
Injured soldiers and aviators got a lit cigarette before medical care at the front.
Cigs became a sort of international currency after the war. There was a Japanese brand called "Peace" that I remember from seeing them for sale.
A pack of Luckies rolled up in the undershirt sleeve seemed like part of the US Navy uniform from the era.
I quit in march of 1986 but it took a full five years before I quit reaching into my shirt pocket.
Old Bogart movies featured men and women sharing cigarettes as a sort of sexual experience. Even Santa gave cartons for Christmas.
A pal who went to med school offered his opinion on smoking, saying the average person might have 20 pack years before tobacco began to subtract from health. And he observed that it took 20 years of not smoking to erase the damage.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the military itself was pushing cigarettes onto soldiers - not sure how this happened probably pushed by the cigarette companies. Really sad. Glad you stopped, Eric. Ron stopped in 87 but some residual damage is still seen on exrays.

I wouldn�ft say the Military pushed cigarettes on soldiers, butI would say they made them easily available. When I went into the service in the 1960s, I guess that fifty percent of the people in the country smoked and the same percentage of smokers was reflected in the Military. There wasn�ft any state sales taxes on cigarettes so you could buy a pack in the PX for ten cents. I didn�ft smoke, but used to buy a carton now and then to give as gifts to my Japanese friends, who preferred American brands to Japanese brands, and I never did sell them on the black market. Also, C-rations usually contained a little package of four cigarettes. I never did see an advertising campaign in the PX or in the clubs pushing cigarettes, but there were several beer companies pushing their products, especially Budweiser.

I would say putting little gifts of cigarettes with C-rations could be viewed as promoting cigarettes. They didn't need to advertize.

Peter-san - Good to see you on here again. I hope your recovery is going well.
Kaoru-san - Also glad to see you here again. You had mentioned health problems sometime ago.
Wally-san - Your analysis on military smokers (Steffi 2009/11/22) is right on.
Steffi-san - The military included small packs of cigarettes in C-rations because they were very popular and likely to be scarce where people were eating C-rations in the field; WWII, Korea, Vietnam and everywhere in between. C-rations also contained a small package of gum and candy and a small package of toilet paper as well as crackers, cookies, hot chocolate, instant coffee, sugar, creamer, matches, a can-opener, and small cans of food that were three meals, a day's rations. All the stuff that wasn't in cans was included in a small water-proof pouch. If anything, C-ration smokes discouraged smoking. Nobody who smoked would smoke them unless they couldn't get anything else because the cigarettes in C-rations were stale and were unpopular brands, obviously from the cheapest bidder. Winston, Newport, Chesterfield among others as I recall.
Eric-san - Peace cigarettes were very good, a little sweeter than Camels, and were my brand of choice when I ran out in town and had to buy Japanese cigarettes.

Kaoru-san - Thank you for the links ("Rinshun-kaku" Sankeien Garden 2009/11/16). Beautiful pictures of Sankeien Gardens and many more beautiful pictures of other things. It's going to take me a long time to look at everything.
For anyone who doesn't know how to translate pages. Go to google.com and enter the web site address, click search, click translate this page.
With luck, "”N‚WŒŽ’†�{ŽB‰e�A‰¡•lŽsŽOŒk‰€‚Ì—Õ�tŠt‚ªˆê”ÊŒöŠJ‚³‚ꂽŽž‚̉¦ŠG‚ðŠÜ‚ñ‚¾‰f‘œ‚Å‚·�B"
will become something like "shooting mid-May 2009, a video containing a picture of the sliding door was opened to the public at the park pavilion—Õ�tYokohama Sankei."
Works for any language. Things that cannot be translated will remain in original language.
Happy surfing.

Arigatou, Dave-san

Peace's blue label was made by designer Raymond Loewy of US April 1952. I also stopped smoking since my BD of Oct. This link is Japan Tobacco Co. "Ukiyoe" can be seen on English site. These are the prints of the 17th century. I think that Peter also was collecting Ukiyoe.

http://www.jti.co.jp/Culture/museum/tabako/topic/peace.html

Thanks for the Raymond Loewy background on Peace cigarettes. Loewy designed the famous 'coke' bottle, many of the Studebaker cars including the Avanti, the paint scheme on Air Force One and many other industrial designs. Loewy's hand touched as many things as Frank Lloyd Wright.

I don't know if Loewy had a direct hand in it, but I know he influenced the design of the 1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk, which I consider the most beautiful American production car ever built.

There were Golden Hawks, Silver Hawks, Flight Hawks, Power Hawks, a Rumble Seat Hawk and GT Hawks. The last one was built in 1964 and made way for another Loewy design called the Avanti.
Some folks down the street from us when we returned to Iowa owned a '57 or '58 gold and white Golden Hawk with dual glasspacks. The sound that car made always made me want one but by the time I started driving, they were all gone.

Has anyone ever been to Takayama? I was just looking at the pictures on j-g and it looks like such a perfect old preserved city. Next to is Shirakawa-go, which also looks beautiful.

We wish everyone a terrific Thanksgiving. Anyone doing anything exciting or out of the ordinary? We'll be with family, spending the weekend and catching up.

I'm a day early but I probably won't have time to get on line tomorrow so, "Happy Thanksgiving !" everyone. I was curious as to whether Thanksgiving was celebrated in Japan and came up with this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Thanksgiving_Day which is close. So happyÇÚ„º¸ÐÖx¤ÎÈÕ Kinr¨­ kansha no hi!, too.
I think we can all be thankful that Peter-san is back with us and I guess we can all be thankful that we are still around to celebrate another holiday and to share our wonderful memories of Japan with each other. I can't remember if we had a turkey dinner in Japan when I lived there but I seem to remember that we did have a bunch of people over and I had to sit around with the adults and be sociable while they were all drinking and having a good time. The Thanksgiving dinners that I do remember with fondness were in Indiana, Pennsylvania at my great grandmother's when I was a young boy before I first traveled to Japan. That lady, Emma Wilson, could lay out a feast! She lived at her daughter's, Julia Pound, who was known to everyone on the family as Aunt Dudi, apparently because when my mother was small one of the kids pronounced Aunt Julia as Aunt Dudi, and the name stuck. Although it was technically Aunt Dudi's kitchen, my great grandmother fixed the dinner and put all the younger women and also us young boys to work helping. As far as I can tell there are only two of us left, me and my cousin Robbie, that can remember a dinner at Aunt Dudi's.
Steffi-san - Barbara and I have a mixed family with six children between us. Five will be here for Thanksgiving dinner but my oldest daughter and her family will be eating with her in-laws in NJ. Five out of six is probably a record so we are very happy. The downside is that it's Barbara's sister's turn to host dinner and I won't get to smell turkey all day or have a fridge full of great Thanksgiving leftovers. You are probably thinking that Barbara is getting a break but I do most of the cooking when it's our turn. So that is our exciting plans for Thanksgiving. I never made it to Takayama or Shirakawa-go but I looked them up on the map and I think they are near where you lived during the Pacific War.
Kaoru-san - Raymond Loewy was a giant who I had never heard of. Thank you for mentioning him. There is a great site at http://www.raymondloewy.com/ that tells a lot about him. I read in the article you posted that he got 150 million yen for designing the Peace Cigarette package.

Steffi, I was glad to read that you, too, have been viewing the japan-guide photographs. I've been a great fan of these beautiful photographs and have been collecting a list of places I'd like to visit if an opportunity ever arises to revisit Japan. Did you happen to see the photograph of the harvested daikon hanging in rows like clothes on a clothesline? You may have noticed that in the left column of the japan-guide home page the pictures are listed in categories allowing you to view them according to your interest rather than randomly as they rotate on the japan-guide pages.

Dave-san, thank you for your interesting information and for stimulating some Thanksgiving memories. Like you, I am in touch with only one cousin from my Pennsylvania family, but I treasure memories of our once large Italian family gathering around a table laden with my grandmother's delicious Italian specialties and my grandfather's homemade wine. Like you, I don't recall having Thanksgiving turkeys in Yokohama, but surely the military must have been serving Thanksgiving dinners in the mess halls and at the Golden Dragon Officers' Club. Our family will have a traditional Thanksgiving gathering here -- our four adult kids, seven grandchildren, and several in-laws -- 19 of us all together. I can't believe that we have a grandson graduating from college in June and a granddaughter who is a college freshman. Wow, how time races by! Anyway, my best wishes to everyone for a very happy and relaxing Thanksgiving holiday!

Does anyone else have memories of celebrating Thanksgiving in Japan?