January 10, 2014.

I found a piano in the back of the warehouse as I was helping Akashi take inventory. She said I didn't really need to be there to help her, that she could do it on her own, but when it comes to supplies and logistics, I'm a total control freak. I absolutely need to know what's what, how much of what we have, how much of it's coming in, and when it's coming in - which I explained to Akashi.

She asked me if that was just how I was, so I told her the story.

During the Third Gulf War, I was commanding the U.S.S. George Washington just off the coast of Israel. Israel had given America permission to launch offensives from their soil to fight ISIS, which was starting to take over the entirety of the Middle Eastern area and invading neutral countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and other such sovereignties, so we were sent in to deal with them. ISIS knew this. They knew Israel was letting us use their bases, go through their territory, so they surprise-bombed our troop movement through Israel as soon as we exited Israel-controlled ground. We had lots of guys out there pinned down, so I had to send out helis from the George Washington in order to get supplies there until our boys in the air could clear out the enemies swarming to the Israeli front.

Somehow, they also had some sort of makeshift airforce of a couple of fighter jets that we didn't expect them to have, and they attacked my ship. I was below decks at the time, and the bombs basically destroyed all of the exits from the decks and trapped everyone below decks in for four days before other guys broke us out. Long story short, it was during that time when I developed my control-freak nature of knowing exactly how many supplies we have and planning out exactly what was to be done with them.

Akashi asked me if I thought I would die during that time, because the way I described it certainly made it sound like it was a terrifying experience. In hindsight, I told her, it wasn't really that frightening. I mean, all things considered, because we were beneath decks, the carrier was strong enough to protect us from further enemy airstrikes, so it wasn't like we were going to get shelled to death. But I'd read survival novels, watched movies and played games in which survival is a major topic and concern. I've heard about the stories that tell of people who're stuck in places with limited resources and need to wait to get help because they can't break out on their own. I've watched Angel Beats, for God's sake. While I've gotten over it since then, at the time, I was nervous and scared shitless to the point where I still have a bit of trauma in regards to keeping track of supplies.

I told Akashi that had I not developed that sense of carefully managing our supplies during that four-day imprisonment in my own ship, my crew and I probably would've had a much rougher time than we did. But at the same time, I told Akashi that I wasn't trying to credit our survival entirely to my own ability. It was only something that come forth out of basic survival necessity.

Basically, I told Akashi that I only did it because I was a scared little bitch on the inside.

Which is completely ridiculous, because I train my soldiers to be unafraid of death or getting injured. I'm a soldier - a bullet's bound to come your way someday. If not a bullet, something else that can kill you just as easily - or just as slowly. But that being said, I also need to point out that I train soldiers - and myself - to be unafraid of getting shot or shelled or beaten to death, not starving to death.

I train people to be unafraid of dying heroic, bloody deaths, "honorable" deaths, if you will - not of horrific, slow, and mind-numbing deaths.

Akashi was a bit quiet after that. After we were done taking inventory, she finally asked me if I thought I was gonna die at any point during those four days we were trapped below decks. I said that if I were to tell her no, I'd be the worst liar in the world.

Akashi was surprised. She told me that I was quite the character in two ways: first, she explained to me that in Japanese culture, appearance is a lot more important than reality, a concept called "tatamae", which I vaguely remember in my Japanese classes way back when. Here in Japan, apparently, you do whatever the fuck you can to put on a facade of politeness, pretend that everything's okay no matter what the personal cost or what you might wanna do or say. Second, she said that even though I was American, I didn't act "American". I asked her what she meant by that, and she said I didn't really act like what Japanese people thought Americans would act like. Or, in other words, I wasn't conforming to the whole foreigner stereotype of the loud, bumbling, overconfident, and typically ignorant and stupid American. She said that when she asked me if I was scared of dying back then, she thought I'd answer all like "Of fucking course I knew I was gonna survive, what're you talking about? I'm American!" or something like that.

I asked Akashi if she thought that I was a loud, bumbling, overconfident, ignorant, stupid and rude American all along, and she quickly denied thinking any such thought. Figures.

So then Akashi and I spent some time talking about cross cultural stuff, since we got ourselves into the topic. One of the things I remember talking about was how I didn't like the whole tatamae thing, that I thought it was bullshit that Japanese society emphasizes superfluousness and shallowness like that just for the sake of politeness. Akashi said that it's because Japanese people generally avoid insulting people at whatever cost, which I guess I can understand, but still, that's bullshit. I'm not saying politeness is bad or that people ought to go around insulting everyone, but I like keeping shit real. I believe in the fact that if you have to get a point across or the situation calls for directness and ain't got time or room for bullshit like politeness, you gotta do what you gotta do. If I gotta slap a bitch or tell an asshole that I'm tired of his shit, then I will. You bet your ass I will. I guess I'm a true American in that respect, but obviously I'm not going to be rude when clearly I don't need to be.

I also remember telling Akashi that having stereotypical beliefs or views about other people wasn't good. I remember when I was going through that stage in middle and high school, when I first started developing my own views and opinions on stuff like this. I bought into stereotypes myself. I thought the Asians were all smart and math geniuses and cared for nothing but acing every single goddamn class and fill up our Valedictorian rows at graduation. I'd pull my eyes to go all squinty whenever I wanted to piss off an Asian guy, which admittedly didn't work all the time because they wouldn't get the whole stereotype about Asians having narrow eyes and just look at me weird, like dude, what the fuck are you doing. And a lot others besides ones about Asians.

But the military changed me. Once I went through ROTC and went to Hargrave (mainly 'cause my parents got me in through connections, thanks nepotism!), I had to force myself to ditch stereotypes and generalizations and all that. I had to work with Asians, bunk with blacks in the same room and dorm, drill with Latinos, shoot with whites, whatever. Lots of times, they'd fly in foreign task forces to train and drill us too. We had this Russian Spetznaz officer fly over to drill us - that was fucking hellish - for a week one time, then we had a Peruvian paratrooper veteran show us the ropes of basic paratrooping. Case in point, in the military, there just is no goddamn room for racial stereotyping.

If you have to train your ass off with the belief that the guy you're working next to just might be the guy who'll save your life out in the field, you tend not to stereotype him. That's just the truth.

Akashi was super intrigued by my stories. She said that everything that I went through, those kinds of stories I told, sounded like a lot of fun, with the disclaimer that obviously it must've been tough on me. She told me that she and the rest of the ship girls, including Ooyodo, only worked with the Japanese military since their construction. They didn't really get a chance to work with foreigners or meet other kinds of people. That's why the ship girls were nervous about being transferred to Okinawa, and that's why Akashi herself was really looking forward to being transferred, because she wanted to see what it was like working with me, an American. She wanted to see how differently I managed things, what I did to make shit work, so to speak. Just being able to talk with me like this wasn't something that was feasible or even imaginable back on the mainland, she said. Having a casual conversation with her superior officer while her officer was still in full uniform and on duty? Impossible. That's not being professional, you can't have conversations like that. But because I'm American, because I'm the one in charge of this base, and because we're away from the scrutinizing eyes of the Japanese military command and government, something like chatting with me is entirely possible. Akashi said that something so simple as talking to somebody else was an eye-opening experience.

It made me realize that just maybe, these girls don't have a lot of outside world experience. The way that Akashi was talking, to me, it really sounds as though none of the girls really know a whole lot about the world, about people, maybe even about themselves. Now that I think about it, it's like...how should I say this, it's like these girls are like...like babies, or tabula rasa, like Lock (Loch? forgot his name) said, whoever that Enlightenment philosopher dude was. Blank slates with not much on them, only just learning about the world. I ought'a go ask them how old they are. Maybe if I know that, maybe thinking of them as blank slates isn't so out of the picture.

This's something, now that I realized, that I'd never expect to think once I got here. I came here thinking that I'd be the one being taught new things about Japan and Japanese culture and language. Now, it doesn't really seem that way entirely. It seems like I can teach the girls here a thing or two about America...maybe about me, too, besides just drilling and giving them orders and teaching naval strategy and whatnot.

Then the question now is, do I want to teach them about myself? Do I wanna teach them at all? No offense against any of them, but the ship girls couldn't handle my drilling before I had to take out the harshest parts. So what is there that'll tell me that the same girls will handle the shit that I've gone through if I tell them about it?

I guess the best answer is just to wait for them to come to me first and ask.