HazeDenki_nyalra - Essay: The Time I Ran Away from Home and Spent Several Days Sleeping in a Park with a Delinquent Friend

I don't even remember what started it, but one winter in middle school, I rebelled against my mother and ran away from home for about a week. A classic runaway phase. Youth!

After some argument, I stormed out into the streets of Naha with a cliché line like, "I'm never coming back!" But after 10 p.m., the city was already full of delinquents and police cars.

There was no way I was going to find a classmate willing to take me in, so after wandering alone for two or three hours, one of the delinquents hanging around in front of Jusco (for some reason, Okinawan delinquents absolutely loved hanging around Jusco) called out to me.

"What're you doing?"

"I ran away from home," I answered honestly.

"Go to Naha Airport," he told me. "It's open 24 hours, you're less likely to get picked up by the cops, and it's warm."

The people who lived in the night were much kinder than I'd imagined. Feeling bold, I asked, "Can you give me a ride on your bike?" He laughed, told me to quit messing around, and punched me hard in the shoulder. That kind of violent communication—that was Okinawa. Before I even felt the pain, I felt a strange sense of relief and camaraderie. After thanking them, I started walking toward the airport.

The road to Naha Airport runs alongside a U.S. military base, lined with chain-link fences. If you got too close, enormous guard dogs would come charging over barking, making it feel like Resident Evil. Even in Okinawa, the night wind was cold.

After about an hour, I arrived. The airport in the middle of the night was completely deserted. It felt like I was the only person left in the world, and that was strangely exciting. I imagined boarding a plane and escaping overseas forever—but of course, that wasn't happening. Instead, I curled up on a bench and waited for morning.

As the sun came up, the airport filled with cheerful people preparing to leave tiny Okinawa for the wider world.

Couples holding hands. Families excitedly browsing the souvenir shops. The contrast between them and me—alone, broke, and sitting in silence—was almost artistic.

Eventually I felt too out of place, so I headed back into town. On a weekday afternoon, Okinawa was nearly empty. Everyone was either at school or work. I was hungry, though, which meant I needed money.

So I went around opening every coin locker at Jusco and the monorail stations, collecting forgotten 100-yen coins. The lockers in Okinawa were surprisingly generous—they returned your deposit when you opened them. Tourists often didn't realize this and simply left the refunded coin behind. We little delinquents made pocket money by hunting them down. If you were lucky, you could make about 1,000 yen in two or three hours.

Night fell again. The streets filled once more with lonely delinquents. As I looked through the groups, hoping to find someone I knew, I spotted a classmate and went over to him.

Turns out he'd stolen a senior's motorcycle. He explained, "I can't go home. The senior's probably waiting outside my house with a baseball bat." Whatever the circumstances, we were now fellow runaways.

Apparently he'd been sleeping in a park. Careful not to get picked up by the police, we walked there together.

There was a large slide and a sandbox. The top of the slide had walls that blocked it from the police's line of sight. During the day he'd stay hidden there. At night, he'd collect cardboard from the dumpster behind a nearby supermarket, lay it across the floor of the accessible restroom, and use it as a mattress. That was his lifestyle.

"You'll get picked up eventually if you stay at the airport," he told me. "In the end, parks are the only option." Listening to the wisdom of someone with far more experience in delinquency than me, we spent the night climbing up the slide and sliding back down over and over again. There wasn't anything else to do. But it was fun.

Late that night, two delinquent girls showed up. They seemed to know my friend, and the three of them started chatting happily on a nearby bench. Not wanting to interrupt, I climbed to the top of the slide and quietly closed my eyes. Even though my friend was only a few meters away, I somehow felt lonelier than I had at the empty airport.

Lost in those thoughts, one of the girls noticed me. She climbed up the slide and held out a plastic shopping bag.

"There's cup ramen in here. Eat it."

That was all she said before sliding gracefully back down and disappearing into the night. I remember thinking, This is like something out of a dating sim. I never learned her name. I never saw her again. Encounters in the night only happen once.

Using hot water from a convenience store, I ate the cup noodles. Then my delinquent companion and I stole more cardboard boxes and slept together in the accessible restroom, shivering through the night. There wasn't a trace of cleanliness in our lives.

Just as we'd finally fallen asleep, someone began pounding violently on the restroom door. My friend jumped up. "Shift change." He quickly gathered the cardboard and told me we had to leave.

Outside stood a homeless man. Apparently, every morning he used this restroom to brush his teeth and wash his face. From this hour onward, he became the rightful ruler of the accessible restroom.

It was already around five in the morning. By then, the risk of getting picked up by the police was gone, so we could safely return to the outside world. Who had decided these rules, I have no idea. But somehow there was an unspoken agreement between the delinquents and the homeless.

After that, the two of us spent many enjoyable nights together. Sometimes we'd stay up all night reading JoJo's Bizarre Adventure at Manga Souko, the 24-hour secondhand store. Other times we'd join gatherings of older high school delinquents.

They'd blast Gasolina from a flip phone, light rolled-up toilet paper on fire to make what they proudly called "Fireballs," and throw them at each other while pretending to play real-life Super Smash Bros. Some would crowd around a drunk delinquent girl who'd passed out. From the outside it was an awful scene. But to them, this too was a perfectly legitimate form of Okinawan youth.

Honestly, I wanted to set off on a journey by train like Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu. The problem was that Okinawa didn't have trains. So no matter how badly I wanted to go somewhere far away, I couldn't. Ironically, I even had someone beside me who'd stolen a motorcycle—just like in Iriya.

One day, while we were living in the park as usual, my partner got caught by the police on his way to the convenience store. He wasn't the type to rat people out, so I escaped without being identified. But with him gone, I figured it was finally time to go home.

After several days away, the first thing my mother said when she saw me was: "Go take a bath." Then she laughed. "I figured you probably wouldn't die." A moment later she'd already lost interest and gone back to playing Tetris on her flip phone.

That casual indifference—that was the only blood family I had. It made my chest tighten. Objectively speaking, it was neglect.

A few months later, while wandering around Jusco at night, I ran into my runaway companion again.

After being caught, he'd been forced home, and the senior whose motorcycle he'd stolen eventually found him and beat him up. He had completely brought it on himself, so I couldn't really sympathize. Still, I was genuinely happy to see him again.

We went back to our old park, climbing up the slide and sliding down until morning. It was a wonderful night.

But when I got home, I realized my PSP was gone.

The strange thing was that I'd never even taken it out of my bag that night. There was no reason I should've dropped only the PSP. An unpleasant possibility crossed my mind.

A few days later, rumors spread around school that my delinquent friend was asking everyone if they had a PSP charger. That made it about ninety percent certain. He'd stolen the console itself—but apparently hadn't realized the battery would eventually run out. He didn't have money to buy a charger, and being unfamiliar with electronics, he probably didn't even know where you could buy one separately.

So he stole from someone he'd spent all those nights with. Was stealing simply second nature to him by then? Had he never considered me a friend? Or was there some other reason? No amount of imagining would ever reveal the truth. Only he knew. So I stopped thinking about it.

I simply accepted that this was what delinquents were like. This was Okinawa. If I ever met him again, I decided, I wouldn't bring up the PSP. I'd treat him exactly the same—as a dear friend with whom I'd shared countless nights beneath the Okinawan sky. And with that, I once again stepped out into the night.