Atsugi

Well, they actually agreed to come with him, at least eventually.

And so when Tofta gets to D.C., he is surprised to learn that he is going to be going to Japan, and he is going to be in charge of agency covert operations in the Korean theater from a headquarters in Atsugi, Japan.

Now, this place had not existed before.

Toft and one of his buddies are strolling around, and I mention in the book that he's munching on chicken sandwich and drinking a beer as he walks around and says, okay, the headquarters is going to be here, the barracks is going to be here, the training area is here, and...

And then if anybody had to divert, you were still scrambling, trying to figure out where the heck you were supposed to be.

So in this case, we had 28 airplanes heading for Atsugi.

And the A3 pressurization schedule, if you stayed at 20,000 feet, it would give you about a 10,000-foot cabin altitude.

But going to 28,000 feet, my right seater had gotten real busy after we had bounced off the boat, and he had never reattached his mask.

So by the time we get to our descent, he's hypoxic and getting kind of fuzzy and doesn't know what the heck is going on.

And so I'm just doing, it's a beautiful clear night.

And so I'm doing this island descent into Atsugi and listening to what's going on.

And, you know, with 28 airport lanes on every one of them on an emergency profile, you can imagine that the airways are a little bit clobbered and there's a lot of activity.

Last week we talked about the Taiyōzoku, the Sun Tribe, and Ishihara Shintaro's novel that gave a name to a generation on this coast.

We talked about the arrival of surfing through American servicemen at Atsugi in 1961, the specific beach culture that grew from it at Chigasaki, and the music of Southern All-Stars, Tube, and Shonan no Kaze that turned those summer days into something permanent.

Today, we go to the water itself, to the island that sits just off the Shonan shore and has been receiving visitors, pilgrims, generals, lovers and tourists for over a thousand years.

Enoshima Enoshima is a small island in Sagami Bay, 6.3 meters in circumference, connected to the mainland at Fujisawa City by a 600-meter bridge.

Okay, time for our first break.

I'm going to introduce a song called Yell by Ikimonogakari.

Ikimonogakari is a trio from Atsugi City in Kanagawa, the city that hosts the Naval Air Base where those first surfboards arrived in 1961, though that connection is entirely incidental to who they are as musicians.

The band was formed on February 1, 1999 by two childhood friends, Yoshiki Mizuno and Hotaka Yamashita, both students at Atsugi College.

The song reached number one on the Oricon charts, Tube, formed in 1985 in Zama City, Kanagawa.

A slightly inland city of Atsugi, and their career has been so consistently identified with summer that they spawned a catchphrase used across Japan.

Natsu wa Tube to tomo ni attekuru.

Summer comes with tube.