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"Get off the street and stay off."

I hated being told stuff like that but the Shore Patrol petty officer was talking to me and I could not pretend otherwise. He seemed genuinely concerned, agitated, not simply throwing his weight around.

"What's going on?" I asked through a haze of Kirin beers.

"Riot. Nobody in uniform will be safe, and," he pointed at my camera case, "no pictures. Find a bar and stay there for the next four hours."

"Riot? What for?" Only a few hours into my first visit to Japan there was winter rain, early nightfall and now a riot.

"Sea dragon. Now get movin'."

He hurried on, shouting at another sailor, one with a slender girl on his arm, but no hat or rain gear. A lot of other people were on the move, too, purpose and perhaps dread in their faces.

Along the narrow side-street shopkeepers were pulling down rolled steel shutters and accordion mesh gates. Across the main boulevard, a six-lane affair, traffic had ceased and several heavy Isuzu trucks were unloading blue clad riot police. Others were further down, near the Main Gate of the Yokosuka Naval Base.

I watched the police form into ranks of plexi-glass shields, glistening helmets and long black batons. In the streaky dazzle they looked ominous and I remembered scuttlebutt about their tenacity and professionalism. Not people to mess around with.

My wool dress blues were getting wet but I did not, for some perverse reason, want to miss whatever was coming. I did move into the shelter of a two-story brick building, where only a misty spray reached me.

Sea Dragon. Why? I knew all about Sea Dragon. My ship, USS John R. Craig, had just come from Operation Sea Dragon, a one-sided, but sometimes dangerous engagement which had lasted about a month, for us. As naval battles go it had not been historic. Naval warfare had gone out of fashion twenty one years before, right out there in Tokyo Bay. I could almost see it in the growing darkness, beyond the high hurricane fence. I had been six years old then and clearly remembered celebrations and newsreels of the surrender ceremony on a battleship's holystoned deck.

Sea Dragon. That operation had significantly different rules of engagement. For the first time since the original confused skirmish between Vietnamese torpedo boats and U.S. destroyers, air and naval forces were expected to be aggressive in seeking out, neutralizing or otherwise destroying gun emplacements, radar cites and other military targets. Over the next three weeks we did that, a long blur of actions against NVA coastal defenses.

The red-sailed ocean junk was notable, and on another day we leveled a Buddhist monastery on a brilliant green cliff side. But after a while the NVA caught on and seldom fired back or lit off any electronics. Or maybe, as we had reported, it was all too badly shot up.

We got some more press out of that, but most of us were too tired to care. After the normal five week tour we were rotated out of the gun line to repair, rest and recreation in Japan. Despite a three day transit at normal cruising routine we were all still zombies.

I certainly was, standing in a December rain, waiting for a riot.

Someone had come up behind me. I turned, expecting to be ordered away from the scene again. But the voice I heard was wrong for that. It was British, or perhaps Aussie. "Anythin' hap'n' yet, Matey?"

He was one of those tall, loose-limbed men who remind me so much of myself. His face was more angular and both his chin and Adam's apple were prominent above a light blue collar foreign navies call traditional. His hair was damp and rusty under a stiff, flat navy-blue hat, the kind our navy had recently discarded. HMS Dolphin was printed in gold script across the crown and a dark swallow-tailed ribbon hung off it, over his left ear.

Submariner.

He was drunk.

A woman was with him. She wore a western style of clothing but was obviously Oriental.

In those days, more than now, I was racially ignorant, unable to tell a Korean from a Thai, or a Rus from a Celt for that matter. But in that elemental, wordless way, I was sometimes keenly aware of a person's state of mind, of their psyche. This woman, I understood, was deeply, inconsolably sad.

She seemed tall, yet shrunken within herself and she kept her face averted, her eyes hidden by tinted lids. Large beads of rain water had gathered on her corbeau hair and in them were diffused the garish lights of bar signs. It made a glowing, misty halo.

European painters had sometimes captured that fated Madonna look. This woman was tragically sad, and where was her child, her future?

I forced my eyes away, back to the sub sailor. "No," I said, remembering his question.

He grunted and stared into the night.

"What are they rioting about?" I still did not believe anyone in Japan cared about a single operation in Vietnam, although a growing movement in America did.

"Not a riot, Mate. At least its not supposed to be. A demonstration, nice and orderly ... but sometimes it gets rough."

"Oh." I said, lighting a damp cigarette.

"They're just students, mostly. Reds pay them to come out. Lads need the money, but they would probably do it anyway. Its just better organized this way. Word is that half-a-million will show up this time."

Half-a-million? On this street? I looked toward the Main Gate. Maybe two or three thousand policemen had gathered and that number seemed huge, uncountable.

"Quite touchy, these blokes, about nukes," he continued. The woman turned as if to leave, but he took her arm and whispered something. She stayed.

Nukes? We had all been briefed about nuclear weapons, to neither confirm nor deny that we carried them aboard, to refer all questions to the American Embassy. I had read John Hersey's book about the bombings. But what on earth did that have to do with Sea Dragon?

We weren't about to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Even Barry Goldwater hadn't said that, although most Americans thought he had.

Headlights fell on us from the rear. A heavy vehicle's engine growled and wet brakes squealed. A babble of urgent Japanese voices accompanied teams of workmen who maneuvered saw-horse style barricades into place. An official whose only badge of rank was a dark raincoat and an assertive, guttural voice motioned us away, back into the alley where cafes and bars and dance halls hunkered shoulder to shoulder.

"C'm' on, Mate. Let's have a beer."

I nodded and followed, feeling chilled and stiff.

They led me past a blur of neon lights, reeling marines and sailors and rectangular, deafening noises - Beatles imitators here, Johnny Cash wannabes a few steps farther, a bellowing argument at the next doorway. Most of the souvenir shops had closed.

At the end of the block we ducked into a cafe. I was immediately immersed in steamy, cloying odors - of mothballs, fish, spicy sauces, beer, damp wool, stale cigarette smoke, candied pork and sweet, syrupy wine, all overlaid and exciting to my senses. It made me both sick and ravenous, repelled and plunged into bliss. Dots of rain burned on my face and my feet were like steel inside icy shoes. In between coursed a dizzying spectrum of variations, as between anode and antipode.

My new friends were the same. I could tell by their rosy faces and glazed eyes. The Brit chuckled and the woman kept her eyes downcast, but the shudder she gave might have been a giggle, or a sob.

My head throbbed, but I laughed, too, and felt blood trying to force its way into my fingertips.

A wary old woman cleared our china cluttered table and we managed to get ourselves introduced. He was Jake, she 'Maggie', his 'Dragon Lady'. "Her real name is Miushi, but my mates and I call her Maggie. She's a ..." He cast his eyes around as if attempting to see a word in his own mind, but failed, "... not eta or hinin, but something like that. I forget the name."

He looked at Maggie, but she refused to help him. He shrugged.

"Glad to meet you both," I said. For the first time Maggie looked at me. It was a very quick look, one Westerners would not think polite. Her eyes were very dark, burning somehow. By the light of the room I could see that her face was shockingly distressed, like finely glazed pottery ruined in the kiln. "What's a hinen?"

Maggie became agitated, but I did not pick it up.

Jake stared at the ceiling. He said, "Hard to say. The word isn't in any official dictionary. Taboo even to suggest that such words exist, you see. Eta are outcastes. In the old days, actors, whores and such were not allowed contact with proper folk. Hinen, on the other hand, are non-humans. Best I can tell, it is better to be non-human than cast-out. Non-humans had to do the shit-stuff ... handle the dead ... morticians, I guess. Also leather workers and butchers ... anything to do with dead things. If they were very lucky, non-humans had a chance of becoming human ... Hibakisha! ... that's it ... the quasi-official, compassionate name for Maggie.

"But that's just crap. Nobody cares." He paused and stared at the empty table. "Guess they won't serve us."

He stood up and pushed between the crowded tables to the counter. I could hear him talking loudly, a Cockney-Japanese creole. Maggie eyed her folded hands and I was fascinated by the severe contrasts of her features - delicate, almost alabaster planes disrupted by angry welts and scars. They were especially noticeable around her throat, where a turtleneck collar had slipped down.

Jake made several trips back to our table, with teacups and a chipped, dragon-embossed pot, two beers, and lastly, a tray full of large steaming bowls which smelled wonderful. The broth contained bits of meat, vegetables and a great knot of long white noodles. Riding the center of each bowl was a freshly cracked hen's egg vigorously cooking itself in the boiling soup.

He handed me a thick porcelain spoon and a pair of chop-sticks inside a paper sheath. "Spoon is for the soup, sticks for the noodles. Ever used them before?"

I shook my head.

He laughed. "Have another beer. It'll be easy." He stabbed the yoke of the egg and stirred it all together. The broth thickened with jellied egg parts.

I cupped my hands around the bowl, relishing the heat and aroma.

Maggie sipped daintily, but not silently at her tea, a thin, pale green herbal.

Jake tipped his beer way back and belched. "You'd think she would like it more, being around us. We're the warrior class, aren't we? Samurai? Kaigon samurai, anyway. You know. Seagoing soldiers.

"But we're worse than she is ... Gaigin ... foreigners. Conquering foreigners. Worse than eta, worse than hinen." His voice trailed off, muttering. "But not as bad as old hairy Ainu!"

He tormented her gently with his elbow. She did not respond.

The soup was delicious, but the more I ate the more uncomfortable I became. It wasn't the soup, of course. It was Jake. I had no idea what he was talking about, rather perhaps I did but did not care to admit it. I was way out of my element, amidst subtle hostilities and poorly concealed arrogance.

Oh, hell. Why lie about it. I was no different than any other American, and how different are the English? We are both bred and born to this or that hatred. I simply never grew to like it, never became a proper man.

"How long you been here, Jake?" I asked, holding down a rising rage. Maybe a change of subject would ease the tension.

"Balls, forever. We came up here from Hong Kong nearly a year ago for repairs. Simple damned problem, but can't seem to get it fixed." He waved his chopsticks around, circling back to his favorite subject. "Everybody here hates us, but they have to tolerate us ... some probably even respect us for that. They've got to. We're winners!"

Winners? I thought about the stalemate across the Sea of Japan, in Korea. Neither we nor the Brits had been winners there, and they sure as hell hadn't been in Burma or India, or the Middle East or even Africa, not lately. I was becoming very irritated with Jake.

"But," he kept on, "the Oriental positively hates a loser."

I lit a cigarette to hide my anger.

"That's a big problem, ain't it?" He was talking to himself now and I relaxed a little. This kind of drunken philosophical discourse was familiar enough to me - irrational, compulsive and finally, morose. "How can anyone live with self hatred? Can't ... can't live with it. It'll kill you, Mate.

"These people believe they've never lost wars to foreigners before, but it ain't so. They think we're the first, but they lost to Chinese Buddhists way back when they were first getting civilized, and before that they lost to old hairy Ainu. 'Course that's a little different. Hairy Ainu lived here first, when the Japanese were invaders. They were Koreans, then. God, how they hate to hear that!

"So how does the Oriental adjust to such as that? They deny it. They say that Buddhism has always been here, and even though they joined and intermarried with Old Hairy, they denied that, too. It was easy enough. Old Hairy, most of 'em, didn't want nothin' to do with newcomers."

Maggie reached across the table and removed the chopsticks I had left in my bowl. She smiled apologetically and set them down separately on the table cloth. I smiled back, grimly.

"Damned superstitious lot," Jake scoffed. "To leave chopsticks crossed, or in a bowl, means that you wish a death in the house of your host." He giggled. "I 'spect that's what happened to the Ainu. Know how they got to be hinen in their own land?

"After the war, when the first Japanese got their asses kicked by a bunch of tatooed savages, they invited the Ainu chieftains to a banquet. No weapons allowed. It was a celebration of peace, right? But after the main course they all stood up with hidden knives and killed every Ainu leader. The first Pearl Harbor, two thousand years ago.

"After that the Ainu were doomed. The Japanese were too vital, too well organized. Over the centuries Old Hairy got to be the scapegoat for everything. He didn't write no books, crave no land or power over barbarians.

"So he got to be outcaste in his own homeland." Jake finished his beer and got up to get some more. "Same thing happened in the colonies." He was talking all the way back to the table. "Aboriginals down under, Hindus, your natives in America. We came here after the war thinkin' we'd do the same to the Japs, but we're wrong."

I raised the beer he'd brought me and tipped it in his direction, but he paid no attention.
"Can't live with self-hatred, y'know. Got to get rid of it somehow."

"How?" I asked, not really caring.

He looked at Maggie. "Yuh blame her, even if its not her fault. She's not untouchable because of anythin' she did, or anythin' her ancestors did. She's taboo because she just happened to live in Nagasaki and has the scars to prove it." He touched her shoulder with his fingertips, lovingly, I thought.

"You just watch, Matey. These people have the will to rule and they'll do it again. Got patience, too. You ever look at these islands, the charts?"

I nodded.

"They claim its some kind of reptile, a dragon maybe, or a turtle. When I get drinkin' enough I can almost see it." He laughed, a gallows laugh. "The whole nation rests on top of a turtle ... or is it a fish, I forget which."

"Speaking of dragons," I said thickly, "why are they having a riot about Sea Dragon? I don't get it."

"Same reason they pretend Maggie doesn't exist. They hate losers. Nukes, to them, means losin'. They can't stand being reminded of it. Part of the national unconscious." He laughed again.

"But Sea Dragon doesn't have anything to do with nukes. I was just there."

He glared at me, fighting some fog in his mind, then glanced at his watch. "Sea Dragon should be tying up right about now, a few slips down from our boat. She's one of yours ... a nuke attack boat."

Stupidly, I stared at him. Sea Dragon is a submarine? Shit! I felt dumber than I had when I found out that Santa Claus was just my mother and father playing an elaborate game. And I felt angry, too, tricked by my own ignorance.

Jake giggled. "You blokes got too many fuckin' ships."

Suddenly the little cafe was a sauna, stiffling. I excused myself and found the tiny, unisex head. It was cooler there, but claustrophobic. I had to get away from there, back outside.

I dropped a few script bills on the table, said, "Thanks" and "Good-bye" to both Jake and Maggie, but neither of them looked up.

"Come down to Dolphin for breakfast," he said to the table full of dishes, "try some kidney pie and grog."

The rain had stopped but the air was clammy and bracing. I took several deep breaths and felt better. There was hardly any foot traffic in the narrow street, although noises from the clubs seemed louder.

Outside was a free-standing marker board. Chalked on it in excellent English was WELCOME USS Shangri-la, USS John R. Craig, USS Hamner and some others. At the bottom was USS Sea Dragon. Farther down the sidewalk other signs read the same. I simply had not noticed before. I felt foolish all over again.

Across the street was a gate. On the other side a narrow stairway forced its way between two buildings. Avoiding a large puddle, I examined the gate. It was wooden, old, not very tall, but locked with a heavy chain.

I climbed over and mounted the stairs.

A landing extended all the way to the main boulevard and I crouched there, hopefully unseen.

Closer to the Main Gate and ten feet above the ground I had a terrific view. Beyond the perimeter fence were huge warehouses and repair shops, and various barracks, headquarters and such. Past them were the masts of warships, alighted with holiday greetings as they nested together among the piers. Behind them was the vast ocean darkness.

Riot Police were still in place, many facing north, up the boulevard. I could see nothing in that direction but a growing din was on the air. It was like being downwind from swarming bees, or too close to high voltage transformers. A charged, galvanic expectancy rode on the salt night breeze.

High on the horizon lights were flashing and it took me a moment to realize that it was a blacked-out hillside flickering with flashlights. The volume of noise suddenly increased and a moment later a mass of people topped a rise and surged down the winding street.

It had begun.

On they came, on and on, countless undulating faces, rank upon rank. There seemed no end to them. They chanted something and their leaders waved flashlights and brightly colored pennants.

But how, I wondered, even in such numbers, could they create so overwhelming a wall of sound? It swept up to me, over me like a physical thing, a numbing, tangible grip upon the heart. I'd felt it before, in a black, typhoon ravaged sea.

And then I saw, in a flash of dark insight, that the group I had been watching was but a rivulet pouring into a much larger flood.

I gasped.

The main body came waving two huge flags, one red, one blue, each banner manned by several athletes, for no single man could even carry the staff. In that crazy light I could make out no markings, but the moving colors seemed radiant, mesmerizing.

A sea of student blue, they were, each tossing a white-capped face, each shouting a piece of the roar. They were organized, disciplined and irresistible.

As a tsunami they filled the barren, six-lane lowlands from side to side, a solid phalanx of human sound, flesh and terrible joy. They rippled, occasionally, as if some saurian beast swam just under the surface. And when they came beneath me the noise lifted my zombic soul, gave it a violent shake and thrust it rudely back up inside me.

I watched for a long time.

With my sodden Miranda I took a few flashless photos, but knew they would not be printable. I waited for the human flood to spill out of its fragile boundaries, for violence to break out, for the inevitable destruction. But, impossibly, it never happened.

Eventually the nerves of my cramped leg muscles and frozen fingers lured me off that exposed balcony. Gratefully exhausted, no longer stealthy, I retraced my steps.

The gate, when I bounded over, did not seem quite so tall, nor the night so cold. Electronic blare from the bars was tinny and distant. A more persuasive sound still reached me from the demonstration. It was not nearly so loud anymore, but still rhythmic, disciplined and captivating.

Through a scud-flecked break in the overcast a new moon showed me one of her horns. A dragon's horn? Dragons. Had I met some of them? I was back on the ground. It was odd, foreign ground, a land of seething and promise. Now I was part of it. A bit of my ignorance had been pealed away and none of it seemed quite so alien. Or perhaps I had become less alien. Is there any real difference?

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The rest of the story is entitled New Year's Eve and is available exclusively on Author's Den.