Vince didn't believe in keeping fit. He believed that man adapted naturally to his life style and while it might be perfectly natural for the primeval hunter to be lithe and lean, such a physique served little purpose for an aging, balding English teacher in Tokyo. The Japanese themselves illustrated the very point that body shape had to be related to life style, Vince firmly believed. How else was man expected to evolve. Just look at the sumotori, young sportsmen in their prime, who needed enormous bellies to be successful in their sport. Stories abounded of a sumotori called Kyokudozan, a big man at 6 foot and 105 kilograms by anyone's reckoning, who was trying desperately to put on weight so that he could compete with the top-ranked rikishi. Then, look at the old women who had worked planting and weeding in the rice paddies all their lives, now stooped into permanently inverted L's.
Vince could think of countless other jobs or sports where the activity dictated the physique of its participants. Runners were inevitably tall and lean, weight lifters were notoriously stocky and taxi drivers always had droopy eyes. Man's body adapted to his conditions. As if he need any further proof of this, the tiniest women in Tokyo, so small boned and refined, usually had massive calves. Their legs could be short, their buttocks and thighs lean, but the calves were another story completely.
Vince pinched the tautness of his own lower legs and noted how over a thousand stairs a day up and down (he had counted 828 alone between home and work) had made them the only developed muscle in his entire body. The others he would use on this occasion or that, and maybe pay for their exertion with a day or two of stiffness afterwards.
Connie was, however, of a different persuasion. She not only exercised on a regular basis, but believed it was fun. She was wise enough never, of course, to do it when Vince was around and she kept her Jane Fonda records well and truly out of sight lest Vince hurl them through the fourth story window of their apartment. Occasionally, she would remark: "Goodness, Vince. Aerobics class is just like going to a disco." Vince, for his part, couldn't think of anything worse than going to a disco. But there was one particular form of exercise that he did enjoy and that was swimming. Right from the tingling sensation he always had at the thought of breaking the icy water to the joys of spending a minute plus under water. Vince really didn't like swimming itself, but he did love the sensation of water on his skin and the sheer joy of dive bombing his brother.
If you are a secret dive bomber at heart, a Japanese swimming pool is not for you. Most pools in the country are only open for eight weeks of the year at the outside, even if they are heated. The temperatures can soar well into the thirties and the humidity can get to 100 % but no self-respecting pool attendant will open his doors before 21st. July. And they will be slammed shut again dead on 14th. September, although everyone well knows that the hot weather hangs on well into October.
As well as their inaccessibility, there are strict rules against bombing and besides these pools are only at most a metre deep which puts the thought of any serious bombing quite out of the question. Everyone had to wear a bathing cap, goggles and a fashion approved bathing suit. Often, you couldn't go swimming in a particular pool without the special pool bathing costume and many pools didn't allow you to go swimming at all unless you had lessons. You could have swum the English channel and you were still required to go through an hour or so of instructor-based training. No doubt, they insisted Mark Spitz take lessons whenever he was in Japan.
Vince only went swimming twice while he was in Japan. On the first occasion, he joined Connie at the newly opened Minami Ward Taikokan which boasted one basketball court, two volleyball courts, six badminton courts and eighteen table tennis tables, but not at the same time. It also had three swimming pools for different ages.
Vince appeared from the men's changing rooms looking, or so he thought, rather ridiculous in goggles and bathing cap. He could only see through the goggles by closing one eye and tilting his head. Through this one eye, he scanned the pool side for Connie and wondered why the children's pool was full of adults.
The answer was simple. 25 metres long, 13 metres wide and 100 centimetres deep, this was the adult's pool. Connie suddenly had Vince by the arm and he could barely hear her, as if he were already underwater, say that they would do laps.
This turned out to be an impossible task. They had gone a whole three metres when the lifeguard blew a whistle and everyone was ordered to evacuate the pool. Vince waded over to the side and pulled himself out.
"What's all this about?" he hissed at Connie as they shivered and dripped on the pool's edge.
"Oh, it happens every hour," Connie explained in a way that was no explanation at all. "It's sometimes a damned nuisance." Vince looked at his wife and wondered if she were becoming more Japanese than the Japanese themselves. The pool attendants were walking up and down scanning the waters. Vince peered in after them, wondering just what they were in fact looking for. Dead bodies? Somebody's lost bathers? Pubic hair that supposedly clogged up the drains? Maybe a telltale yellowish tinge, evidence that someone had pissed in the pool.
After five minutes, everyone was readmitted to the pool and Vince noted that there were now twice as many bodies in there as there had been before. Try as he might, he couldn't swim more than a metre and a half without colliding with someone, usually a young woman who would squeal, as he plunged up out of the water to discover that he had touched her in an uncompromising place like the elbow or the shoulder.
Vince couldn't have been totally sure, but he could have sworn that one girl had told him in frenzied Japanese: "Why don't you molest people on the train like everybody else." After two laps of this, Vince was totally exhausted. He waded once again to the sidelines and sat with his legs dangling in the water. He could see Connie doing a very good impression of Dawn Fraser with people on all sides scampering out of her wake as if she were the Bismarck. Then, Vince suddenly realised his problem. Connie was the only person in the swimming pool who was actually swimming. The others weren't dive bombing either. They were simply wading up and down the lanes as if they were in a foot race. A thought suddenly occurred to Vince. Could they be ...? Surely not. No, they couldn't possibly be. Well, perhaps they were in training to strengthen their calf muscles in preparation for another week of thousands of stairs, miles of station corridors. No, surely they couldn't be. It didn't bear thinking about. Strengthening one's calf muscles wasn't the only reason to go swimming in Japan, it appeared. Vince only went to one other swimming pool in Japan, although he did like to swim off the Pacific coast of Chiba occasionally. Swimming off the coast of Yokohama was not exactly desirable, although there was a strip of half of a kilometre of sand that had been dropped in Kanazawa Ward to make the Umi-no-koen beach. Between 21st. July and 14th. September, the place was packed with people sun-bathing, paddling or hunting for sea shells. He got the impression that it was possible to walk across to Chiba at this particular point. In any case, for every minute the average Japanese bather spent paddling, they spent at least five minutes washing it all off. One day, without Connie, Vince went to a huge swimming complex called Wild Blue in Tsurumi Ward. He'd read about it in a number of magazines and his parents had even told him about a documentary about it in Australia.
It was quite obvious as he joined the ticket queue which was already 40 metres long that he was the only person by himself in the entire place. It was a haven for young families and trendy couples with matching bathing costumes. Vince always looked at women, young or not so young, beautiful or not so beautiful, and he found that he could instantly tell the difference between the mothers and the girlfriends, although there was often no appreciable difference in age. The girlfriends had bathing suits that required the shaving of great tracts of pubic hair in order to stay legal under Japan's stringent pubic hair laws.
The Wild Blue dressing rooms, Vince noted, were a massive expanse in themselves - locker after locker, dozens of showers, separate changing cubicles and a special breezy tunnel for drying off. He was pleased to see that he could easily leave everything in the changing room and especially didn't have to take any money with him. His locker key had a bar code that registered on your bill which you paid in the lobby as you left. The completely covered swimming pool was so balmy that no towel was required for drying off. In fact, on an already hot day, Wild Blue was even hotter inside. This was to give the impression of a tropical paradise and also a reminder that it was one of the few all year round swimming facilities.
The water was also heated. This didn't really suit Vince because he loved the freshness of cold water. There were also signs up everywhere warning against dive bombing. Nevertheless Vince could see that Wild Blue was the place for him. There was no need for goggles or bathing cap and the whole place did have a tropical feel to it. There were bungalows with rusty rooves and plastic tropical fruit drying on them. There was an old pirate wreck, caves and rocky areas, an old rum factory windmill around which five water slides wound their slippery ways, and a fortress like building that turned out to be one of several bars, not five seconds saunter from the water. Deck chairs lined a mock beach area which was in fact a grainy concrete or processed sand. Tiny waves lapped in and you could float out to around one metre, quite obviously the standard depth for swimming in Japan and Vince pitied those with very long arms. It obviously did get deeper as there was a rope buoyed by coconut floats marked the limit for swimmers.
All at once, the life attendants were clearing the pool and Vince found himself wondering if someone had not lost their bathers yet again. There seemed to be an awful lot of life guards. Did this mean that a lot of people drowned at Wild Blue? Everybody huddled on the shore expectantly as if they'd never been told to get out of a Japanese swimming pool before. Then, all of a sudden, a voice like the Delphic Oracle, like the Cecil B. DeMille's depiction of the Lord Jehovah calling Moses from the burning bush, like the voices of evil taunting Batman, resounded off the wall and the first BIG WAVE, more than a metre high rolled in, crashing onto the concrete beach front. Soon, there were folk tumbling in on foam surfboards from beyond where the coconut markers had been. The waves kept coming until there were no more surfers and then the waters regained their calm lapping. Body surfing on the big wave, like spinning down one of the 1 to 5 grade water slides, seemed a lot too energetic for Vince and the spa baths and saunas on the sidelines were just too sedate. It was upstairs that he found his happy medium - a three metre wide continuous swimming lane, 120 centimetres deep and 350 metres around. It wound under bridges and through the wreck of the pirate ship, along rocks and through caves. There were even points where you could get a view of the Big Wave rolling in, if you felt suddenly in the mood for extra excitement.
This was Vince's idea of exercise. There was really no need to do any swimming at all and even wading to strengthen your calf muscles was rendered unnecessary. There was a special jet current that would merely push you lazily around each lap in an anti-clockwise direction. And after every second orbit, Vince would pop out for another quick beer at Cafe Fortuna. Fortuna was a good name for it as it was right by the waterway. You couldn't miss it.