Kaichi will surf anywhere in San Diego, any time. It’s what he came here for.

KAICHI, THE JAPANESE SURFER, has seen the faces of dead samurai in the tubes of waves he has ridden. Since surfers are often spiritual, it should be no surprise that Japanese surfers would be especially so.

Kaichi sees ghosts often. Sometimes, as he sits in the almost empty apartments of his Japanese friends in Pacific Beach, he sees the spirits of dead cats and dogs sitting on their owners’ shoulders. He sees these things, but it is the ocean that haunts him the most, never lets go of him, so much so that he spends hours each day, in the morning and into the evening, catching waves up and down the San Diego coast. He loved the O.B. pier (until someone stole his Jeep), and Scripps, and Black’s. He’ll surf anywhere in San Diego, any time. It’s what he came here for.

There are about 50 or so of them, in their late teens or early 20s, Japanese who carry surfboards instead of cameras. They are all students, usually from wealthy families, who have come to America to consume, speak English, and surf. Not quite expatriates, these young Japanese men and women, in their stone-washed jeans and Jimmy Z surfwear, come to San Diego out of a restlessness that does not fit the image of the homogenous Japanese.

There is Kaichi, and there is Ken, and Takashi, who doesn’t surf. There is Koji and Atsushi (“the Kamikaze”), who will catch any wave and has the scars to prove it, and Hiro, who wants to become an American at all costs. There are their girlfriends who, like themselves, are in their late teens and early 20s and who have come to San Diego for the sun, and the waves, and maybe the culture.

They can stay for six months at a time, some with host families in places like La Mesa and University City, until they develop an understanding of San Diego, then move out to bare apartments in Pacific Beach and near SDSU that they furnish with rice cookers, futons, and maybe a lamp, living off phone calls home to parents and alien I-20 immigration forms that classify them as students. Although they are bright in that stunning way that Japanese students are, they mainly try to skate on the schoolwork, doing little more than trying to learn English in small language schools around the county with names like Converse and Language World.

Some go to UCSD or SDSU for their English instruction, but even there, it is often a token gesture: time put in for the I-20. They know they will return to Japan and understand that they will eventually become mere business cogs in the Asian economic juggernaut, or engineers, or import-export entrepreneurs. They will make money with an inevitability that becomes their class and culture; but for now, they are interested in (some, obsessed with) the Great American Beach.

None of them knew the others in Japan, but now they are friends, all tightly bound by a common obsession. They surf together, each buying two or three $300 surfboards that would sell for $1200 each in Japan, trying out every spot along the coast of San Diego and Mexico. They come to San Diego because Japan, in all its pristine surfside beauty, generally breaks poorly. According to Ken, who has surfed all over the Japanese coast, the only good places to bag waves are off the coast of Yokohama and up north among the ice floes.

His rough English is the best of the bunch. Of the surf at Yokohama, Ken says, “Many, many surfers are at Yokohama. The waves are not very big. When it is warm, there is much...” — he makes gestures with his fingers, searching for the word — “...plankton.”

Kaichi says that at one beach on the east coast of Japan south of Tokyo,“I dropped in and —

Ara! in the wave — I saw...a face: ancient Japanese warrior...” Koji said that at another spot, where, in the Japanese mid- dle ages, many peasants jumped to their deaths from nearby cliffs, he glanced into the water beneath his board and saw the face of a young mother and child. “Their faces were very white. Like ghost,” he said. “They were very sad,” sounding more haunted by their misery than the actual experience.

They see no ghosts in San Diego surf, but they do have scary experiences. His first month in San Diego, Ken surfed Windansea Beach, a “locals only” spot. Coming down a wave, a blond surfer cut him off. As Ken paddled out again after wiping out, the blond-haired surfer said something to him. Ken did not understand because “my English was not very good.” Ken took off on another wave, and as he paddled back out, the blond surfer shot down a wave and ran into Ken’s face with his board. In a rage, Ken waited for the blond surfer to come back out and yelled at him in his best English. The surfer looked at him with a frightened expression and paddled away. A moment later, Ken ran his hand over his face and found blood. He still has scars from the surfer’s board, and in some ways, he’s proud. Now he surfs Windansea all the time because “I’m a local now.”

Ken tells such stories to those who live here, and they gnash their teeth and apologize for others’ rudeness, but Ken says,“It is not necessary.” His father went to school in America and, with his excellent foresight, named his son Ken because it is both a Japanese and American name. Ken has seen the kindness and the rudeness in Americans and appreciates both. He says, “Some villages in Japan are the same as Tennessee. They do not like strangers.” San Diego has been especially good to him, he says, and he loves the surf. “The water tastes better, and there is not so much seaweed or plankton.”

Ken is tall and handsome and has an appealing modesty that some Americans confuse with shyness. He will be a mechanical engineer when he goes back to Japan, but he hates the Japanese business structure and the idea of joining a company for life.

When Ken was learning English in high school in Yokohama, he read a book called Catcher in the Rye. After he finished it, he read it again, then once more, letting the filter of his mind strain out what it could from this quintessentially American novel of adolescent angst.“I do not understand lots, but I like Holden Caulfield very, very much.” He pronounces this name “Ho-den Koo-fed.”

Ken learned to play the guitar and formed a band that played American music for the U.S. servicemen in the bars around Yokohama. He loves Bob Seger and Huey Lewis, but his favorite is Bruce Springsteen. His favorite Springsteen song is “Born in the USA,” but he does not understand the verse that goes, “Sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the yellow man.”

“Does he hate the Japanese?” Ken asks. The message is explained to him, and he nods in understanding. Like many Americans, Ken mistakes this song of disillusionment for an anthem and says that when he used to sing it for these American soldiers, he often cried.

Ken found a dead body while surfing off La Jolla Shores. This was when he first got to San Diego. His English was practically nonexistent. “I was shouting,‘Dead guy!’ They [the other surfers] thought I was crazy.” They dragged the dead surfer out of the water, and when the TV news came, they could not use Ken, who didn’t have the words for an interview.

It is no accident that when one calls Ken’s Pacific Beach apartment and gets his answering machine, the Beach Boys’“California Girls” is playing in the background of his message. Ken met his first California Girl (this is how he refers to them, in capital letters, like the names of goddesses) while on a surf safari in New Guinea. He and this California Girl had a liaison, like two speedboats passing in the night, and after that California Girls held a special place in Ken’s heart. He wrote an essay for English conversation class comparing California Girls to Japanese girls. The thesis was that California Girls are more “direct” and “open,” but Japanese girls are “more soulful” and “better for marriage.” He concluded that he loves California Girls but will marry a Japanese girl.

Ken met his girlfriend while surfing Black’s Beach. Juniko came to San Diego for the sun and thought she’d give surfing a try. She lives with an Irish punk rocker coed who is majoring in communications at San Diego State. If you go to the Boll Weevil and order a pitcher of beer with Ken and Juniko, she will pour the beer for everyone at the table.

If you try to pour the beer for her, Ken will stop you. He will say, “It is her pleasure,” and she will smile at you. She will pour the beer in a strange Southern California Boll Weevil restaurant echo of a tea ceremony, even if she does surf on her own and wants to work in international marketing between Tokyo and Los Angeles. Her happiness is implicit in the action of serving: pouring the beer is her pleasure.

Kaichi collects surfing lingo the way the windshields of two-ton semis collect bugs on a cross-country trip. He writes the words down phonetically in English, then in katakana, a Japanese alphabet, then their definitions in kanji, another Japanese alphabet. He loves writing down tube or lip, gnarly, and radical. It is what he came here for.

He hates the Japanese who come to San Diego as tourists and take pictures of SeaWorld and the zoo, calling them “hot dadus,” until someone corrects his English to say “hodads.” He repeats this to himself over and over until it feels natural. It is to his eternal embarrassment to use these words incorrectly, because they are sacred to him, chants to be used among the American natives and shown off among his less hip countrymen.

Kaichi’s hair is a golden rust color, cut in a hip bowl shape. His live-in girlfriend Asako put chemicals in their hair that react with the sun and salt water to turn it that color. They are both 18 years old.

Kaichi loves Australian sheepskin Ugg boots and leather bomber jackets. He is a very good surfer because he goes out every day, even in the dead of winter. The only time he didn’t surf was last year when Asako became pregnant. During those times, he sat at home with her in their empty, white- walled apartment in Pacific Beach and read Japanese novels. “No TV, no music, just sit in silence.”

Asako is small, and her hair is long, spilling in a bronze cascade around her wide cheekbones. When she smiles, it takes up her whole face. During those times Kaichi was scared for her. “She laughed at nothing. I would say, ‘What’s wrong?’ and... nothing.”

The couple didn’t know about Planned Parenthood and free pregnancy testing and $150 abortions, but they soon found out.

No such options exist in Japan, certainly not on the scale that is here in San Diego. Having already planned to return to Japan and be married, they found out that Asako could have an abortion, an alternative with unknowns that terrified her. It took her three times to make the appointment, once even driving up to the clinic just to turn around again; but because she wanted to stay in America and did not want to go back to Japan and get married, she finally went through with the abortion. Afterward, Kaichi spoke of her “great sadness.”

They wanted to find a Buddhist temple to say a prayer for the dead child. An American friend who didn’t know any better tried to talk them out of it; but Kaichi, who sees ghosts in rooms and elevators and in the surf that he loves said, “I must. Every year on this day, for my life, I must pray.”

Takashi, with the blue eyes, doesn’t surf. His contact lenses give him that special possessed look, but they match his spiky, gelled hair and white-, blue-, and red- colored cartoon shirts. He is over six feet tall and skinny, but his cuffed jeans cling tightly to his legs. No one — not Kaichi, Ken, Atsushi, or the others — knows why he came to San Diego. “He does not leave his apart- ment in Mission Valley,” one of them says. Takashi talks about his day: “I went to Nijiya Market in Kearny Mesa to buy food and came home to watch a Japanese movie I rented. With my friends I drink beer, whiskey, te...”

“Tequila?”

His fishy blue eyes brighten.

“Yes! Yes.”

Takashi and his three friends downed a 12-pack of beer, a bottle of whiskey, and about half a bottle of tequila. This is the norm for the group: they practice drinking.

“Then we talk,” he says. “About anything.” About Genke, his cat. “Genke” means “center of center,” an appropriate name for this young man who came thousands of miles never to leave his Mission Valley bread-box studio.

Ken said that Takashi did occasionally make forays to Tijuana and had caught syphilis there three times. Once, he forgot his passport and was denied entry back into the U.S. until his friend came down to pick him up.

Hiro’s favorite expression is from Beverly Hills Cop, when Eddie Murphy kiddingly says,“Get the fuck outta here!” When Hiro says it, it makes his white friends laugh. “I love America,” he says.“I want to live here forever.” Hiro is the only student of the group who has a job — he watches movies for a video importer and sends reports to their office in Tokyo on what American films Japanese would enjoy. He thinks they will like Indiana Jones and Cocktail. He says he did not like Everybody’s All-American, which he mistakenly called Everybody’s an American, because it was “too American for Japanese.”

From his one- or two- movies-a-day watching, Hiro has picked up a large vocabulary of English colloquialisms and can recite a litany of dirty words and expressions. He asks his American friends constantly about such expressions, when to use them and with whom. His chubby face becomes confused if his friends aren’t able to fully explain when to use these words, so he tests them out, using them in all sorts of situations: in schools; at the beach; at Mr. Sushi, his favorite restaurant, where the sashimi is “good — like Japan.” He likes to sit at the sushi bar and talk about the massage parlors that he used to frequent in downtown Tokyo and the excellent geisha women he knew. He’ll even write down the names of the places for anyone who wants them.

Hiro wears denim exclusively, chain-smokes, and wears his prescription Wayfarers indoors. His hair rests in a kind of pompadour, and his favorite jacket is a baseball jacket from Japan with nonsensical English expressions stitched across the back. All of this makes him look like a junior member of the Yazuka, the Japanese Mafia, which may or may not be far from the truth.

One day Ken got in a car wreck. He had a Volkswagen diesel truck, and while driving down Garnet Avenue in Pacific Beach, he was rear-ended by a high schooler in his mother’s car. The high schooler figured out that Ken wasn’t from around here and began blaming Ken for the accident. Ken has hired a lawyer and is going to sue the kid. “I feel like a real American now,” Ken said with a smile.

Kaichi had a spare weekend once, so he and his friends drove to Las Vegas. On their way there, they saw a sign for Barstow and Death Valley. Death Valley!

“I knew Death Valley from movies. It is a very famous place to Japanese. When we think of America, we think of Death Valley,” Kaichi said. They took the exit off Interstate 15 and drove around Death Valley. Not through it — all the way around it. Finally they parked and tumbled out of the car, standing in the vast, empty desert heat, letting the sand blow into their faces, getting a feel for this country. They did not take pictures.

Then the three Japanese students got back in the Honda and drove the rest of the way to Las Vegas, where they gambled all night. Sometime later, it occurred to them that the Grand Canyon was nearby, so the next morning, they set off for Flagstaff, leaving one friend behind to gamble. They drove all day and made it to the canyon by dusk and got a full half hour in of the view, then spent the night driving back to Vegas to pick up their friend (who had lost close to $2000 by this time) and then back to San Diego in time to greet the rising sun.

Ken visited the U.S. once before he moved here, taking a ten-day tour of 20 states. He slept on the bus. Once, in Tennessee, the owners of a diner tried to make him eat his lunch outside; but Ken, who is not the mild, bowing, Japanese type, ate at the counter in silent defiance. This reminds him of another time when he was in the Denny’s in Pacific Beach, and he asked a man in the booth next to his for a light. The man turned away and said,“I don’t speak Chinese.” Ken wanted to explain that he just wanted a light and that he wasn’t Chinese, but the man ignored him.

Ken compares these moments to other extremes, like when he walked into a Taco Bell in Pacific Beach to ask for directions and ended up getting in an hour-long conversation with the manager, who was stationed in Yokohama during the war. “The manager said he loved Japan and Japanese. He wrote directions to where I wanted to go and told me to come back to talk to him anytime,” Ken said. He shrugged. “Sometimes Americans speak to me because I am Japanese, and sometimes they do not because I am Japanese.