Home Away From Home : A Quiet Beach

The sea laps endlessly onto the rock-bound beaches of Kobe, Japan, where Nobuko Nabeshima was born--and lived until she was 20.

“The water had a strong power; it soothed me as I grew up and I walked close to it all the time,” Nabeshima says.

Even now, 10 years after she left, Nabeshima thinks of those rocky, seaweed-filled beaches whenever she longs for home.

Especially at New Year’s, which she says is “a very big family-get-together day in Japan, just like Thanksgiving and Christmas in America.”

When she moved to West Los Angeles, just minutes from the shore, Nabeshima said she realized the beaches weren’t at all like home. “At Santa Monica or Venice, the beaches are just sand. It doesn’t even smell like the ocean.”

Then she discovered Zuma, where “there are rocks and seaweed and an ocean smell. And the configuration is more like home.”

Nabeshima, a linguistics student and part-time intern at a sound studio, says she has “very many good friends in Los Angeles,” and always gets more holiday invitations than she can handle. “But somehow, I would rather be alone at Zuma Beach.

“I like that it’s the Pacific Ocean. So at the end of it is Japan. I sometimes think I can almost see my homeland on a clear day. And just to think that this water may have touched my beach at home, that it goes back and forth to my land” makes her feel less homesick and more “in touch” with home.

Nabeshima says, “When I feel the need, I usually go (to Zuma) at early morning or twilight. And I just sit. I bring a pot of hot coffee and my radio so I can listen to my favorite baroque music.”

At New Year’s, especially, she gets up early in the morning and “it’s just me and my car all alone on the Pacific Coast Highway. There’s no traffic at that hour on New Year’s Day. In Japan right now, it’s the snowy season. But here it is the most beautiful time of year.”

Late afternoon at Zuma, she says, offers “the most beautiful sunsets you will ever see. The sun goes down right over the ocean. A lot of people in Los Angeles don’t even notice; they say Los Angeles has no seasons. But they’re wrong. You can see the change of season by the sunset. In summer, it goes down over a totally different place.”

Nabeshima says she “really appreciates” the beauty of Zuma. “When you’re very upset, it’s fabulous medicine. When you’re homesick, it energizes you and makes you feel whole. That repetition, the come-and-go of the tides, gives you power, because that is basically our lives. A day comes and it goes. It is not a boring thing at all. Uniqueness can be found in common things.”

And a trip to Kobe can be found on the Zuma strand.