The Smell Beyond the Fence

May 6, 1965, Sagamihara, Japan. An AI reconstruction of a childhood memory.

What I remember most clearly is the wing and tail of a jet sticking out of a house. My friends and I were coming home from school the day after a U.S. Air Force jet crashed into the American military housing compound. We could see the wreckage through the chain-link fence. We used to call those houses アメリカンハウス (“American house”), with a little envy and admiration.

Sagamihara was the first place I lived when I moved to Japan with my family at the age of six. We were there for about a year before we moved to central Tokyo. My father was a reconstructive plastic surgeon who had trained and become board-certified in the United States. He often worked with American military doctors, and I remember playing with some of their children on weekends.

I looked for a photograph of the scene as I remembered it. When I couldn’t find one, I used Gemini to try to reconstruct it. What surprised me when I saw the image was how vividly I could imagine the smell on the other side of the fence.

I can hardly stand the smell of soot. For years I put it down to two fires in my Brooklyn studios in the 1990s. Cleaning the soot off my artwork was hard physical work, and my throat stayed irritated for some time afterward.

I remember the smell of burning from West Chelsea, too. For months after 9/11, my future wife and I could still smell it from the small south-facing terrace of our apartment, coming from the direction of the World Trade Center.

The wing and tail are what I remember seeing in Sagamihara. I’m less sure what I smelled that afternoon. But looking at this image now, I wonder if that was where my profound dislike of soot began.