Michelson's two week transpacific voyage ended when we tied up at the Yokosuka navy base. First, I had to learn how to pronounce it, yo-KOOSH-ka, rather than saying it the way it looks. I accompanied one of the navy guys who had been to Japan before on a train trip to Tokyo. This impressed me as a very busy city, somewhat like New York, but nearly incomprehensible without a guide. I learned to eat with chopsticks the hard way, having deep fried fish with steamed rice sitting a counter in a little restaurant that had no forks. Later I learned this place was called a tempura bar. The food was great.
We visited a couple of Tokyo's Ginza district department stores. Young women bowed to the customers as they entered the store or got on the escalators. The exchange rate in 1964 was 360 yen per US dollar, very much in our favor, unlike today.
Yokosuka's navy exchange store was a low price paradise for those looking for the latest gizmos, gadgets and electronics. In '64 everyone wanted a single lens reflex camera. The Canon FX that I bought there was simple but served me well until 1968 when some miscreant broke into my car in Saigon. The early SLRs had little or no automatic features so you had to learn f stops and shutter speeds. I took better photos then than I take now with an automatic camera!
Reel-to-reel tape recorders were also high on the wish list. One of my roomies bought a fancy, quasi-professional looking machine and installed it in our stateroom. He had only enough money to buy one tape, a recording of Handel's Messiah, which he played and played and played. I learned every aria and chorus. Haleluiah!
The exchange also had a supply of (then) exotic booze. Another one of the guys walked into my room with two huge brandy snifters and a bottle of VSOP cognac. "Hey, John, try some of this!". John did try some and learned to like it. Michelson seemed to have a number of sailors who had tastes for stuff bigger than their paychecks.
Yokosuka was a navy shipyard, a small version of the Brooklyn yard, except that all the yardbirds were Japanese. Electricians were shop 51, shop 11 was a bunch of shipfitters and welders came from shop 26. Supervisors wore white hardhats. Some years later I found that the shipyard at Pearl Harbor was organized in the same manner.
Michelson went to sea for a couple of weeks, conducting its first Pacific Ocean surveys. My nights and days came with a G. F. Handel 1741 baroque sound track.
Upon return to Yokosuka, it was time for me to leave my seagoing home of two years and head back to the US. In early December of 1964 my four year tour of duty was almost up. I flew to the west coast and the Treasure Island navy base in San Francisco Bay for out processing. By the 14th I was home in New York. I started to think about looking for a job.
