Times up, campers

Sweater Boy guarding “his” beach. Grrrr.

Today is a day to celebrate. August 20 every year is when an invasive annual beach camp pulls up stakes and gives us our prized Nemoto Beach back.

They came two months ago. God only knows who gives the camp organizers permission to take over a public coastline, from the highway all the way down to the water and at least a mile in width, but someone does. Maybe our overly-desperate-for-revenues local government?

Someone rubber stamps these people. Someone starts charging money for tiny patches of sand.

Imagine a national beach deserted for just over 10 months out of the year. Only the sound of birds and gently crashing Pacific waves. Not a single automobile, pre-fab structure, trash can, fast food shop, porta-toilet, or electrical grid wire, and only a handful of humans and a pet dog or two visible at any time of day or night…suddenly in July converted to a hyper crap “Burning Man” campout for peak summer. Just imagine.

Today the rows of campers, vans, plastic tents, canvas lean-tos, nighttime lighting, and awful takoyaki and yakisoba shops are clearing out. August 20 is expiry date. Bada-boom. Later, people.

Nemoto Beach is our dog Terashima-kun’s playground. Several months ago when we were unaware of the impending “camp,” we brought him down for one of his morning runs. We slowed the car to the dirt strips where we usually park and found a traffic jam. Part-time security guards were guiding in camper vans, horrible people with inflatable plastic chairs, doughnuts, and umbrellas were crossing the highway—a marshalled invasion of the beach was underway. We looked left to the water side and saw at least 10 rows of packed tents already set up. “Oh god, no way,” I said as I hit the gas and returned us home. From today we finally can start going back to “our” beach.

Japanese have a love affair with what they call camping. Cooking and sleeping under the stars is of course part of the activity, but a love and reverence for nature is not. Campers bring contents of department stores with them, and they surround themselves with toys, gadgets, and “comforts” of home that will help soften the blow of actually experiencing the outdoors. Even pop music is pumped out through tinny loudspeakers on tall poles placed through the campground—again helping to stave off the uneasy, lonely feeling of natural surroundings.

The visitors pay money for this experience.

Lonely. Awful. We need some inflatable chairs.

The only comfort Japanese campers maybe have yet to successfully bring to the outdoors is air conditioning, but I don’t put it past them to one day solve that challenge. Already most bring solar or battery powered plastic fans to help bring breeze to their allotted slots.

One saving grace. As the world has already seen during the Olympics and other recent global sporting events, Japan is now hyper-vigilant about post-event cleanup. (This is a rather recent ecological consciousness—until maybe a decade ago, littering beaches and camp sites with refuse was fully accepted.)

In the next few days when we safely reclaim Nemoto Beach, we expect to find not a trace of the recent invasion. We know they were there, but the coastline will be spotless, and I am thankful for that.

Toru and I have decided to let the campers have “our” beach for two months out of the year. We are subleasing it out, and frankly the sun is way too hot for us to be out there anyway.

I for one am looking forward to lonely autumn dog walks by the waves.