a great day on an island of trash

One Saturday Sarah and I were invited to a barbecue in Enoshima, an "island" that is actually reclaimed from the sea and built on landfill. Friends, sunshine, boombox, badminton, grilled salmon and steaks, Chu-hi and Asahi, sake from an enormous bottle... which, after emptied, a bunch of people thrust into my hands while forcing a blindfold over my eyes and convincing me that it was a Japanese tradition to blindly split a watermelon with a sake bottle. Then they pushed me onto the tarp where a watermelon lay, Makoto pleading "Just don't break the stereo," while I stumbled around and finally succeeded in cracking open the melon to great applause (and without stopping the reggae thump from the boombox). I think it was all an excuse just to laugh at a blindfolded gaijin, but whatever.
Also there was the scent of eucalyptus permeating the park-- a smell I know in my veins from a childhood in the Los Angeles hills, but that most of the Japanese people at the barbecue had never experienced before (I had no idea they had eucalyptus trees in Japan either). I ran up and grabbed a fist of leaves from one of the trees and crushed them in my hands, to share the mentholated koala goodness with everyone, many for the first time.
One sobering moment of the day was when Sarah and I wandered into that big weird upside-down ship thing in the background of some of the photos, and discovered that it was a monument containing the remains of a fishing boat accidentally bombed by the US during the nuclear tests around Bikini atoll... We felt very conspicuously American all of a sudden. But then went back and joined the party.
Later, there was karaoke and a psychedelic bar in Shibuya, and the unfortunate last train home at 12:15... But in the immortal words of fellow Californian Ice Cube, I have to say it was a good day.