Sasebo, Japan
My only time spent in mainland Japan was in the lovely city of Sasebo. It was a lovely city, and it doesn’t deserve what us drunken sailors do to it.
This particular night was brought to you by an independent steaming deployment in 2010. We had already been to Okinawa and had the brief on how to interact with locals properly, i.e., don’t smash their property. We arrived in Sasebo for a two-day working port visit, meaning we could go out in town, but we were still going to work during the day. We were there mostly for parts and supplies, but also to get people out to medical, dental, qualifying for second-class swim, etc.
After qualifying as a second-class swimmer, I had the remainder of the afternoon off. A few friends of mine were going out, not my usual liberty group, but I decided to hang out with them regardless. One of them was having a birthday. He had just turned 21.
You see where this is going.
The night started out pretty mellow. Low-key authentic ramen and sushi, a couple beers, and then head over to Shooter’s Shot Bar. If you’re here because you’re preparing to visit Sasebo, I cannot recommend this place enough. It’s owned by a retired sailor, and the mood of the place is just fantastic. We were introduced to the mighty drink known as the Chuhai. A Chuhai (choo-hai) is a fruit-flavored liquor, and it sneaks up on you real bad. Real. Bad.
My friends and I had three of them each because we were told the stuff served in bars is about the same as a beer. While that’s true, Shooter’s don’t fuck around with none of that weak stuff. They were serving the same Chuhai that comes in cans, which has an alcohol content of about 9%. That’s 18 proof. Now, having been underway and hardly seeing land, we had low tolerances.
Feeling the buzz come on, we did what rational sailors do: we drank more. Shots were served. Of what, I’m not sure. All I recall is that there was a few. We paid our tab and left, but being that it was only 7 pm, we decided to go into Sailor’s Town proper.
Can you guess why it’s called Sailor’s Town?
This is where stuff gets fuzzy. We went into the first bar in a particular alley loaded with bars. Seriously, every twenty feet was another bar. If you can find the alley, good for you, but I don’t read Japanese, and I had no idea what street it was on. In this bar, they had Filipina “Buy-me-drink” girls. Disclaimer: all of the bars had Filipina “Buy-me-drink” girls. Some of the girls were the wives of sailors stationed at the base. That concept disturbed me.
We did a fair job, the five of us, at keeping our shit together to this point. Then on the top shelf of this bar, we saw it: Habu-sake. If you’re not familiar, Habu-sake is a type of sake that’s bottled with a snake inside. Some people say the snake is bottled live, and sometimes you find it with scorpions in it as well. Having not bought a bottle of it myself (it’s found in a lot of places in Asia), we decided to order a shot. This seemed to genuinely entertain the bartender, who had clearly never seen anyone order the drink before. He broke the seal, poured three shots (one of us wasn’t having it), and we drank.
Habu-sake is a novelty drink. It can be consumed, it’s safe, but it’s not particularly good. In fact, I can tell you right now it tasted like turpentine. It was unpleasant, but at least I can say I drank some snake juice.
We ended up at another bar. More shots. Things get real hazy here. I don’t sing in public, and we began singing Bon Jovi at a Karaoke bar. Yes, it was Livin’ on a Prayer. No, I wasn’t good.
At another bar, we ended up nearly kicked out by the Buy-me-drink girl when my friend (the one with the birthday) called her a bitch. He did so nonchalantly because one of our friends was talking to her. She was the bartender, he was ordering a drink, and the birthday boy said “Hey man, fuck this bitch, lemme tell you wassup.” That’s a direct quote. After talking her down from her righteous Filipina fury, we decided we’d had enough and were going to walk around some. Stagger, actually. Carrying a guy while staggering, actually, in between bouts of vomit.
Let me explain the scene to you. I was drunk. I shouldn’t have been caring for anyone. I was searching for one of our buddies, who had gone AWOL from our line of sight. Two other guys were throwing up in the alley, and another was curled in the fetal position on someone’s front stoop.
I had literally just opened my mouth to say “Has anyone seen-” when he rode past me on a bicycle. It wasn’t his bicycle, he found it in front of someone’s house. If you’re reading this and you had a bicycle go missing from Sasebo in the fall of 2010, I’m so sorry. I told him to put it back, but he didn’t know where he got it from anymore. I’m sorry, Sasebo bike owner.
Pictured: fifteen seconds later.
We gathered everybody up, and we decided to go to another bar. Our decision-making abilities were pretty well hampered. We ended up going to a bar called The Westerner, because hey! We’re Westerners!
We walked in when I was sure enough that nobody was going to throw up inside, and came face-to-face with every sailor’s second-worst nightmare: a wardroom function. Almost every officer on our ship, except for the ones on duty, was there. This includes the Captain and XO, who immediately saw us. I was standing upright, saw all the officers, said “Good evening, sir” as best I could to my department head, who waved at us.
Birthday boy stumbled past me, propped himself on the bar, and said “HEEEYYYYY SIR, WASSUP. WANNA BUY ME A DRINK? IS MY BIRFDAY.” He wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular. He pretty much just said it to the whole bar. I grabbed him by the arm, said good night to some of the officers (most of whom were more shit-housed than we were), and began to walk out. One of the officers, a younger Ensign, ran across the bar, stumbling, and came up to us.
“Hey guys, wanna- do you wanna round of drinks?”
We did.
So we had a drink with the wardroom, which was actually a high point of the night. The CO and XO, always bastions of professionalism, were pretty sober, nursing beers at a table with some of the other senior officers, but the junior officers, as college students do, were getting ripped. Two guys in our group were flirting with some of the female JOs, and it seemed to be working pretty well for them. It was not meant to be, however, as our Weapons Officer walked up to me and whispered “Hey man, you should probably get them out of here.” I nodded, they paid our tab (gangster-ass officers that they were) and we rolled out.
We made it out of the bar pretty safely and got a cab, finally content to go back to base. Sitting in the taxi made me drunker than I would have been standing up. I don’t know why I’m like that, I just am. We got back to the base, the cab driver told us the fare (in good English, too) and four of us pulled out our wallets. Guess who the fifth was? Good ol’ birthday boy. He screamed “CHEESE IT” and flung the door open, running into the night.
We paid the fare, and with a degree of drunken irritation, sent one of the guys to chase him down. I was, at this point, pretty irrational and content to just leave him behind. Obviously, this would have been bad news for all since you get punished as a collective when one guy runs off into the sunset while you’re on liberty. We caught him eventually, once he was confident the cab was gone and that he’d pulled a fast one on the driver.
Before going back to the ship, we stopped at the McDonalds on the base at Sasebo. Whoever thought to put that McDonalds there, I thank you for the greatest drunk burger I’ve ever had in my life.
We made it back to the ship without incident, and the next day I found two of our group inside of medical with IVs in their arms. One of them was a corpsman, and apparently that’s a hangover trick. Ingenious little bastards.
