All your US Navy base are belong to us

Recently I had my first excursion to a real life US military base here in Japan. Not any base, but the largest base in Japan; the Yokosuka navy base. It was an almost surreal experience, as me and Ms. Sunshine merrily walked from the station to the actual base and as we gradually got closer, signs, menus etc. started appearing in English and not only in Japanese. It felt a bit strange to see a noodle ship with the menu items rudimentary laid out in English and posts for apartments in the usual Japanese style, but all in English.

After being roughly told off by men with guns to wait a few meters away from the entrance we waited for our military friend to pick us up and guide us through the necessary paperwork needed to gain entrance to the base. Fortunately, since the US has not yet labeled Sweden as a part of the axis of evil and Japan is a close strategic military ally we could quickly go through the process and avoid being sent to Guantanamo. My key concern at the base was to avoid being shot by any of the military personnel since, even though the base is located on Japanese soil and lies under Japanese law, the US military has jurisdiction over any crimes committed by military personnel on the base, which theoretically means that I could have gotten the New York style Haitian immigrant treatment without any repercussions to the shooters if they were smooth enough.

The actual base struck me as remarkably unremarkable, it looked less than my expectations of a military base and more like an immigrant heavy suburb to Stockholm, minus the graffiti and with only white buildings. Somewhere around my fifth question to my host regarding under which conditions the guards would actually shoot at me and what actions on my behalf could get him court-martialed (since we were allowed in under his responsibility) Ms. Sunshine started to get worried about what I actually had in mind to do and stopped any further inquiries into this fascinating subject.

As we reached the on-base shopping center and our main destination things started to get surreal for real. It felt like we had been dropped in the middle of a boring small US shopping mall and not like we still were in Japan at all. Moving around the area were mostly western people with just a few Japanese people and at the entrance of the store they had even brought in one of those huge cumbersome and defect prone US style soda machines and as added measure, it only accepted US dollars.

As we entered the store, the illusion was complete. The nowadays familiar Japanese brands were nowhere in sight and the selection of everything from candies, clothes to DVD movies were the same as we had been in a US store. Even the Japanese brands they did carry were obviously “imported and then exported back to Japan” with English packaging. Since we usually do not have this kind of access to western product brands and also adding that the prices were both cheap to begin with and also tax-free, a minor shopping spree was initiated. The most prominent and important purchase was probably the full set of Arrested Development DVDs since my previously bought pirated copies were wearing a bit thin.

I guess this is the closest you can get to a day trip to the US here in Japan and it was an interesting experience.