Kyushu Spring Vacation Part 2: Sailing and a Dutch Twilight Zone in Japan

Sorry about that month in between updates, the weeks have started to slip by with alarming rapidity as I approach the end of my time in Japan.

On my second full day in Kyushu, I went with Nate and a few friends to Sasebo, the northwest corner of Kyushu, to do some sailing.  We participated in an amateur, just-for-fun race and then cruised around a little on a slightly chilly day.  It was great to be out on a boat again, it's been a couple years for me.

I asked what these strange towers were and learned that, amazingly, they are the now-defunct mainland origination of the "Tora Tora Tora" signal.  That was the signal for the Imperial fleet to attack Pearl Harbor.  Without modern communications, the Japanese had to bounce radio signals between stations throughout the Pacific to reach the fleet.  The fact that I was able to just calmly sail by this place and talk about it with a Japanese man is pretty stunning in some ways.

Coming back to the Huis Ten Bosch whirlwind...

Afterwards we ventured into Huis Ten Bosch, the massive reconstruction and imitation of a Dutch city that the harbor was attached to.  Part theme park, part shopping mall/entertainment center, part actual resort town for the super wealthy, Huis Ten Bosch was incredibly strange. 

The whole place was built to scale to imitate an 18th century Dutch town, in honor of Kyushu's centuries-old connections to the Dutch.  There's not a whole lot else I can say about it, except that there was random musical theater and a man in a mouse costume popped out of a door, bowed respectfully and unironically, and continued on his way while we were walking around.  Normal rules of reality were suspended for the afternoon.  All I could think of was that the Japanese had gone back in time, dropped a neutron bomb, and replaced all the Dutch inhabitants with nice Japanese families.  Funny but more than a little unsettling.