The Remembrance of the Laundry Gate (Part 1)

After a day spent trying to get the work done to meet the weekly deadline, this evening I headed to a nearby pub that I haven’t visited in a while. The place is a Western-style pub, that is, the one with no seats, the likes of which I see opening up here and there these days, and which is somewhat of a novelty in our country. But the kinds of dishes and alcohol they serve are no different from those you find in typical izakayas. So it's far from the one you might imagine from the word "pub;" it's more like the ones you'll find in shantytowns like Sanya and Kotobuki-cho, but not in a bad way. I had a really good time there with few people around me. I wonder why the place was so deserted considering how nice it was to stay there in a relaxing atmosphere and how affordable just about every dish they serve was. I was just watching passersby, most of them middle-aged salaried workers, walking down the street in front of its well-lit entrance without even casting a glance at the heavenly place I was in. Mildly drunk but feeling somewhat unsatisfied, I went out, hoping to satisfy a bit of wanderlust that had set in as the spring unfolded with a spell of fine weather, despite the “kosa” from the Gobi desert that’d been making the sky a bit yellowish in a weird sort of way. Not having any idea where to go, I got on a JR train and transferred at Tachikawa to another line that is bound for Okutama, the mountainous area of Tokyo that I thought would fit well with the euphoria I was feeling thanks to the Mother Nature. I got off at Higashi-Nakagami to have another drink. Then I recalled that there used to be a US air base in and around the city, which had been entirely transferred to Fussa-city long before and is now called the Yokota air base. One of the things I remembered in association with the area was a song titled “the remembrance of the laundry gate,” which I used to like a lot. The amazing thing about this age of the Internet is how easy it is to ferret out information on just about anything you like to know, and I’d already known a thing or two about what the laundry gate was after doing a few searches.

(To be continued)