Rest & Recuperation

Continuing the history of my sexual education (as though anyone really cares), when I was in Korea in 1953, I went to Japan twice for R & R, rest and recuperation. I don’t know how much rest I got, but I recuperated nicely. Two buddies and I from our platoon flew to Fukuoka City on the northern shore of Kyushu. One of the buddies knew how to find girls while we were there, and the next thing I knew we were situated in a hotel with young Japanese girls there for our recuperation—Chiko, Reiko, and one whose name I can’t remember, none of them with any more than pidgin English, but we didn’t really need conversation. I had Chiko for the first half of the week and then Reiko. I don’t remember why the switch. Maybe I wasn’t as pleased with Chiko’s looks as I was with Reiko’s. An unfeeling bastard I must have been. I also don’t remember ever leaving the hotel to sightsee. We were there for a week and I don’t remember anything except the drinking and eating there in the hotel. And the sex. It’s hard to call these girls prostitutes or whores. They were simply making very good money from GI’s at a time when life couldn’t have been all that good for them. But that might be the same story for most of the hookers now working the streets of our country. The week ended and we returned by air to our base in Korea. About a half a year later I went again to Fukuoka City for a second R & R, this time alone. I again found a girl, probably with the help of a cab driver. She convinced me that we should stay in a fancy hotel she knew of, and we did, spending most of our time there. Her name was Seiko Furui, and again I fell in love. She was probably five or six years older than I was and spoke excellent English, a tiny girl/woman, orientally attractive. While there, she convinced me to use the hotel’s universal bathing facilities, an experience I went to blushingly like the naïve young man I was. But after a time or two, bathing with as many as a dozen other people, I outgrew my embarrassment. My main memories of that week included a meal I had more than once, a ground beef steak topped with a fried egg. What an odd memory. And we went one day to Dazaifu Park where I took pictures of her and the statuary and buildings. I still have most of those pictures. But none of Seiko. My mother, the guardian of her son’s innocence, must have found them and removed the evidence of my loss of innocence. The pictures of Seiko vanished along with the stamp I once owned called The Naked Maja. We tearfully parted at the end of the week, both promising to write each other. I think I wrote and received one letter. And that was the end of the romance. I often wonder what happened to Seiko Furui. I hope she had a good life, one paid for with the dollars of the soldiers she educated and recuperated.