We moved to California by train leaving on a Southern Pacific Superliner and moved in with a cousin of my Fathers by the name of Charlie Cantu and his wife (Emma?). We stayed there for enough months for us to enter school and get our overseas 'shots'.   It was here where I first learn about the violin .  I lost the 'privilege'  to play when my violin came out of its case and crashed on the ground breaking the bridge or something. 

We got our shots and in the summer of 1950 traveled by ship leaving San Francisco from Ft Mason. We left on the USS Buckner PA-xx. It took about 2-3 weeks to cross the Pacific Ocean. We entered Japan at Yokohama.  We met our Father then boarded a train and had an overnight train trip North to another port where the tracks ended.  We traveled by train ferry to Hokkaido Island and then traveled to a small Japanese village named Noboribetsu.   

The spa town, as such, began to be developed about 140 years ago. Then, Takimoto Kinzo, looking for healing waters for his ailing wife, found just what he was after here, and his wife, after bathing in the waters, recovered from a terrible skin disease. Together the pair built the first ryokan, beginning the largest mineral spa in Japan. Photo (on the left)  is the family next to the volcano (picture are L-R  Viviano, Mother, Larry and Marvin (behind mother), Beatrice and of course father.        

We stayed at the Grand Hotel for several months while accommodations were being made for us at Camp Crawford close to Sapporo, Hokkaido.  This is a picture of room # 308 within the Noboribetsu Grand Hotel.

Hokkaido ("Road for the North Sea") is the adopted child of modern Japan. It has been scarcely 100 years since the Meiji Restoration when mainstream Japanese first considered it a viable place to live. Before that, it was home only to a few vanquished samurai and the ethnically mysterious Ainu, aboriginal tribesmen . This far and mysterious land was called Ezo ("alien people who live in the north"). Today the island's relatively vast interior is the only area of Japan that truly merits the words "untamed wilderness."  

We came as conquering Americans. We also came a kids. We were in the hotel about two days when we learned about earthquakes and started to mingle with the local kids. One day we came across a snake which Marvin, Larry and I chased. The snake entered a small stream close to the hotel.  Our commotion attracted some Japanese kids and so they on one side of the stream and we on the other, chased that snake, killed that snake and in short order found new friends.