A Morning Musume。’14 Hawaii 2014 Report

Part 3: Day -1: They Have Landed.

Here’s what you’ve been waiting for they the day they’ve landed, day -1, and… wait a second, -1? That’s right, for anyone living in Hawaii, the excitement starts at day -1, if day 0 is the optional tours, then day -1 is the landing. Early tour groups, and the girls are sure to arrive on day -1. Naturally, this is an uncharted day, no one expects anything out of day -1, it’s really a chance of fate if whatever you plan to do that day crosses over with whatever they happen to be doing.

After a small misstep in our plans working on how to help spread Aloha, a friend and I decided to head for the mall. It’s true we had no explicit reason for going to the mall but the small chance that we could cross paths with someone. It’s little different from your average teenager going to window shop in some sense, but at the same time I can understand how questionable it still sounds. Yet, given the opportunity we found a reason to be there, so that it wasn’t a trip for nothing.

A walk through the mall isn’t anything unusual. In my free time when going to get a game or look to see if there’s any PBs or CDs for cheap I take a trip to the mall and check things out, walking across the mall just to see what’s changed or you know general people watch. This time with all our walking we found ourselves basically just looking over the normal things. Nothing out of the ordinary, we had no idea what we were looking for really. After doing this kind of thing over and over I got use to the idea that, “it’s like finding a shiny needle in a pile of almost as shiny needles,” you’re looking for someone barely distinguishable from other people, and you’re paying for the search with sweat and exhaustion.

We had just about given up when my friend was in shock. I turn to the side towards where he was facing to see a young woman passing by with a sanitary mask around her neck. Her light jacket covered her top but a prominent red skirt and purse accented her look, and casual flats on her feet. Our brains literally stopped working properly, my friend looked at me saying, “It’s her right?” and I simply kept saying, “Is it?” My heart sped up in the thought. In all the years I’ve decided to walk around to see if I’d ever see someone, this was probably the first time I wasn’t just getting some extra exercise. The young woman turned her head but never gave us a clear look of her face, and yet for the two of us we were almost sure of what we saw.

It took only a moment before she left our view into a nearby coffee place. We watched in wonder if she would come out the way she came in. We couldn’t approach her, no we couldn’t, it would be foolish to be so disruptive, against our cause, at the same time we wanted to know if we were just kidding ourselves into thinking it was someone it wasn’t. Alas, it was the last we saw of the girl, we sat stupefied in our luck. We weren’t 100% certain of what we saw, we couldn’t really be sure, but we walked away that day without regrets, and happy to know we might have seen something magical and rare. We’re pretty sure now we did.