Biggest Man in Town

Today on my Sunday off, I went to the town of Yokosuka for the first time. Technically it was my first time in Japan because bases are US soil. Yoko has about 400k people - not too shabby. Once off the base, Americans thin out and you are surrounded by swarms of Japanese. Old, young business, school age, it has it all. One great thing about Yoko is that it is not too cramped. It has only a handful of tight building street, but the rest is pretty open, with hills in the back of the main district. I walked through a rose garden area across from the Navy docks where old artists would be sitting on stools water coloring the roses





Here is a view of the shopping center from a distance. I walked in, than walked immediately out. Shopping centers are perhaps the place where I feel most foreign. Massive amounts of color, japanese writing, advertisement models with extreme eye contact - they are a trip.



One of the highlights was walking down a side street that was obviously preying on American tourists. "Urban clothes", kareoke bars advertising beer pong, and knock off military fatigues littered this street called "Robuit st." (I think??) Luckily, I saw this gem, too bad it was closed.



Here was another indoor/ outdoor shop strip



Yokosuka seemed to have an interesting musical theme. There where storm drain with trumpets in the medal work, and multiple statues with this gentlemen playing with his shirt off at the train station.



During my stroll through Yoko, I might have been the biggest person in the city. There were taller, but none with my 210lbs. Maybe some other american sailors I saw were bigger, but I was def in the top 99%.



Overall, Yoko is clean, yet pretty run down. The natural beauty is its strenth, not the infrastructure. I only saw one homeless man, where in any other metro center in the world there would have been tons in that tourist shopping center environment.



Going into town is extremely invigorating, even if it is in the tourist trap for military personel (double whammy).