Saturday May 4, 1991
M2 wanted to try a night in a Capsule hotel and I'd been curious, too. So we head out of Nagasaki station and see one directly across the road. We go in and M2 handles the transactions. (She does the speaking and I do the reading and writing. Between the two of us we have one person who can almost manage first year Japanese.) The manager waves his hand in front of his face to indicate that he has no capsules left, but then he recommends we come back 22:00. It's only 19:30 now so we decide to take the trolley to the center shopping district.
Extremely tired, we return to the capsule hotel, and are told that there are no capsules. But, says the manager brightly, you can sleep in the sauna. We think not, and leave. (A few weeks later, I find out that a sauna is not a dry heat sweat bath, but a roomful of reclining chairs--sort of like sleeping in first class on an airplane.)
The next place we try has a sign "No tattoos". In other words, gangsters, keep out. We walk in, and a very stern man standing with his arms akimbo, moves his head slowly back and forth and raises his forearms into an X (batsu), meaning no. "Dame. Dame." (No way.) So we turn around again.
We walk down the street, trying hotels as we pass them, but there is no room at the inn. So, M2 finally calls a halt to our wandering, and we camp out in a hotel lobby while she tries phoning up hotels. As she is doing this, a middle-aged Japanese couple comes in and asks if there are any rooms. The deskman tells them no and that we are looking for rooms, too. So the couple comes over to talk to us. They introduce themselves in English. It turns out that they aren't a married couple, but two English teachers who have come with some of their students to Nagasaki for the holiday. They come up with the idea that the three of us women should sleep in their car; and that the male teacher will take the students (all boys) to a karaoke bar.
M2 and I are so desperate that we need little persuasion to agree. So we walk back in the direction of the station. The good news is that the "car" is actually a van. (We were wondering how all three of us were going to sleep in a Japanese car.) The bad news is that it's in a locked car park. One of the students stands on a moped and climbs over the security fence to let us in. The police come and the couple spend some time explaining why they're breaking into their own car.
A Japanese mini-van is still pretty mini, and we sleep shoulder to shoulder, unable to turn over. We are awakened the next morning when the car park owner discovers us. He is furious and yells at the poor woman for about ten minutes. The entire time she is bowing and apologizing. Eventually, she pays him some money to settle things.
The boys show up. It turns out they weren't actually singing all night at the karaoke bar. They simple rented a private room for the night and slept there. Apparently this is another way to sleep your way cheaply across Japan.
The first thing we did this morning was return to Nagasaki station and go to the assistance desk and book two beds in the Youth Hostel.
The second thing we did was go to the hotel where MJN and I stayed and spent ￥１５００ on the public bath. We did the cold bath, the radon spray shower, the hot bath, the massage bath, and of course the jiggling massage chairs. Ah, that's better. Now for some sightseeing.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
May 04, 2003
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We should have had a better plan.