To this day, some still swear he came from space. Still others claim he was from the future, sent back in time to save us all from some terrible fate. Those who knew him best understood him to be a simple scholar and wanderer from the far-off land of Ohio...who happened to also be a time-traveler from space. He carried many names in his brief 2 years on the island: Adam, Eiichi, The Captain, Gaijin, Gaijin-san, and any derivative form therein containing the word "Gaijin". He fought the good fight, offering up knowledge with unusually high production values with one hand, and vicious flashy-pink hammer blows with the other, always his head in the clouds and his heart in the loving embrace of the sea. Many things to many people, this Paul Bunyanic paradox personified lives on in the legends of this tiny aquatic neverland, each story more contradictory than the last. The debates rage long into the night, over gallon-bottles of throat-searing black sugar Shochu liquor, this dive-rat swearing he once saw him riding a whale and speaking with the turtle-people of Keraji Point, this one claiming he wore the tank for only decoration, and in fact possessed gills, hidden beneath the thick-padded orange wetsuit-overalls, and BCD (Buoyancy Control Device) studded with patches from a mysterious land known only as "Canada" that were his trademark.
Those who remember the man before the legend, when he was a mere roguish man-boy school teacher, striking poses of roguish man-boy skepticism and sending middle-schoolers into fits of epileptic rapture with his golden hair and chiseled 12-year-old physique, look back fondly on the moment he first entered the water. Dive Instructor First-class Yoda never forgot that first moment, releasing the air from the vest and sinking below the waves, only to look up and see Adam still floating serenely on the surface, the faintest hint of confusion flitting across his face as if to say "Odd. I should be sinking." Yes his mighty Gaijin mass was indeed a formidable force for buoyancy in the world, requiring that several dozen additional kilograms of solid metal be wielded directly onto his skeleton before the waves would even shuffle his application into the "maybe" pile, on the college-admissions desk of the deep.He learned with an almost superhuman quickness. Instructor Yoda recalls: "I had taught him how to do a half-mask clear, for when you get a little bit of water inside your mask and you need to blow it out, and had gone up to the surface to help out another student. Next time I came down, Adam had not only filled his entire mask with water and successfully cleared it, but had also filled his entire lungs with water, and successfully cleared them." a feat considered by most to be akin to suicide even for the most wily of sea mammals, to speak nothing of the relatively water-averse humanoid.
His love of the sea only grew from that moment forward. He would spend hours at a time staring vacantly out the window, out towards the sea, probably when he should have been doing something work related. His life became a shallow facsimile, a support structure existing only to drag his cumbersome land-meat along as far as the next weekend, the next dive.
On his first dive to maximum depth of 18 meters, he was the gleaming golden god Cortez to the trembling Aztec Clown Fish of the Somachi Cliffs. He spoke in a booming voice, conjuring torrents of bubbles from thin-water, and striking fear, or at least mild-bemusement, into their orange and white-striped hearts. And it was it this moment, as he floated alongside these strange denizens of the depths, and cast his eyes across an endless alien field of coral masquerading as Alveoli, Brains and Nervous-systems, that he knew love. And like any man confronted with the wonder and terror of the infinite unknown within himself, he set out to make this world his own the only way he knew how: violent conquest.He dove the endless plains of Onotsu to broker alliances with the Morays, underwater street thugs with a penchant for dark alleys, and intimidation. He dined with the giant conch people, and then when peace could not be reached, he dined on the giant conch people. Some say the last of their now extinct brood is kept in his freezer, a grisly reminder of what happens to those who dared to cross him. He subdued teeming shoals of jack-fish, and sparred with the rock-shrimp before they sealed up their holes forever, choosing to take their chances weathering the siege in their vast underwater tunnel network, instead of dare challenge the new lord of the sea. He observed the highly venomous sea-snake from a comfortable distance, but you can bet he did so with malice and hatred in his heart, and was in no way intimidated by said sea-snake when it showed up later in the dive about 2 feet away from him, and kind of looked him in the eye, and maybe winked a little. So great was his power and influence, that by the end of a mere 4 open-water dives, he had driven the turtles, sharks, whales and dolphins away from these waters forever, with the mere force of his presence—for why else would he see no evidence of any of them?
Unfortunately, it was his ambition that would eventually be his downfall. His dominion expanded faster than his delusions could maintain, and he was discovered one day, half-mad, curled up in a dirty-blanket, bits of seaweed clinging to his dive-overalls, a half-eaten snorkel hanging limply from his lips as he mumbled curses at the sea who had bested him. He disappeared from the hospital that night, and was never heard from again. Some say he returned to the future, or to space, his mission accomplished, our grisly fate averted. Others say he grew weary of the fight and, his bloodlust sated, followed the turtles and dolphins Westward, to new lands where he could live in quiet solitude. Either way, the seas of Kikai will forever remember the courageous young man: lunatic to most, visionary to an important few.
Though he is with us no longer, we dive on in his image, remembering the simple message he fought to spread with every moment of his short, underwater, life:
"That Peace Sign thing you guys do in photos? It's silly."
