The beach is the only place of enjoyment that the human species has discovered in nature.

I went to the beach today and wanted to write about it. I don’t have a manifesto. The beach makes me feel good.

Sunstruck, my upper arms still scattered with volcanic beach sand, I looked up a line in The Production of Space. Henri Lefebvre writes: “The beach is the only place of enjoyment”—jouissance, the original has it—“that the human species has discovered in nature.”

I would like to start there.

Lefebvre in Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment defines the beach in his description of a place of fourfold elemental collision—the earth ending at the sea; the sky melting into the earth and the sea.

The beach is different from other natural spaces because “bodies no longer experience water alone or earth alone,” he writes, “or air and sun in isolation ... Each element plays a role, receives the others and protects itself from them by sheltering living bodies; water protects the sun and the sandy earth from the assaults of the sun, the waves ... Fire burns and consumes by its own force, water engulfs, and the air sweeps away and dries. Where they end, the beach begins. … A space of enjoyment.”

I can guess at what he means by enjoyment, or by jouissance. It took me a long time to find it at the beach.

“Children discover a form of perfect pleasure” on the beach, Lefebvre insists. I did not.

I was on the same beaches as he was—resort town beaches, on the Mediterranean in Spain. I spent summers in a stucco cabin on the Costa del Sol. I preferred to stay indoors, as I recall; I don’t remember what I did to fill my time. My only exterior memories are of a pot of paella (it has swollen in my memory a bathtub-sized monster), a dead baby bird being devoured by ants, a merciless sun, and ice cream. Of the beach, I can only summon memories of tanned, pendulous breasts. I lost my chance.

I lived too long in landlocked places. There were no waves on Diefenbaker in August. Maybe I felt jouissance picking across rocky shores out on the Island, but Lefebvre demands sun and sand. I never felt it on Lamma, watched over by surveillance cameras and smokestacks.

There was a hint on the public beach at Bamburi of jouissance, the greatest combination of human chaos and natural order, human deprivation and natural abundance. Maybe it was only fear.

There was a taste at Lianyungang. Up the coast from a fishing village turned over to the tourist trade, there was a beach accessible usually only by picking at certain hours along the coast. It was known only to the few young people left in the village. It was dangerous. The ocean smelled like sewage. It was deserted. We lazed naked in the sand, then swam out too far. We had to escape up the cliffs. That sounds like jouissance. It sounds like enjoyment, at least. It sounds like the fulfillment of Lefebvre’s description of the body breaking out of the temporal and spatial shell; it sounds like his description of an “awkward” physical culture. In other words, that was the closest I came to becoming a wild thing.

That is what Lefebvre—the Nietzschean-Marxist with trouser cuffs rolled up, gazing out on the beach—is talking about, as far as jouissance goes, I estimate: it is to escape all alienation and domination. It cannot be private. (The best example of an architecture of enjoyment that he gives is the Baths of Diocletian.) Jouissance, at least for Lefebvre, is something primal.

It is something sensual, too, but not in the narrowest sense of that word.

He quotes: “Do I counsel you to slay your senses? I counsel the innocence of the senses.”

He says: “Formed and deformed by the motions of labor, bodies assume a certain plenitude here. … The sensual and the sensory meet as well. Who has never wanted to make love on a bed of sand or beneath the caress of waves? The total body begins to appear.”

I think Lefebvre is right—that the beach is the only place of enjoyment to be found in nature. (But why not a mountain trail? I might feel some enjoyment there, but it is too obviously a re-enactment of some ancient labor. But why not camping on the Great Plains? I am occupying a tiny point, fighting for the head of a needle. The key is the fourfold collision. The key is sun on shoulders and feet in sand. The key is nudity. Maybe Lefebvre could explain further.)

I try again and again to get back to that feeling.

I devote my summers to the beach. That is one of the reasons to live near the water, even if there is always the danger of it sweeping over this city.

Today, it was Oiso, down the Shonan coast.

Years ago, I would have gone to Zushi instead.

I went for reasons other than the elements. I tricked myself into thinking Zushi preserved some traces of its transgressive glory days. This was Showa nostalgia of a sort. It was the site where local beach culture was inaugurated: young men and young women with only faint memories of the war made pilgrimages there from well-to-do Tokyo neighborhoods to mixing with tougher suburban kids to coordinate sex, inhalant abuse, surfing, and sunbathing. This was once transgressive. They spent their time in reckless leisure. Their tans were a mark of difference. They dissolved barriers between classes. They forsook the mountains and the hot springs for recreation on the black sand.

I’m not sure anything taking place at Zushi now could be considered transgressive.

The rebellious beach is dead.

The sun-tribe, captured in literature by future Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro and in cinema by countless exploitation films, disappeared, or it began to take on another form. The rich kids stopped showing up. The middle-class kids can afford to take a flight to Okinawa or Guam. So, the beach became a suburban working-class phenomenon. Zushi is a place for Kanagawa high schoolers. It is patronized by young men that work in the warehouses and factories that remain in the prefecture. It is patronized by the beautiful young women that work at commuter hub sex industry operations.

There is not much rebellion. A bad reputation required a crackdown. There are signs all over, advising visitors; no tattoos, no smoking, no drinking, and no boisterous behavior. Tighter regulations meant success for entrepreneurs. There is a Red Lobster. There are nightclubs. It is a good place to produce social media content. Tourists go there because it is famous.

Zushi Beach is one type: the beach so thoroughly urbanized that there is no longer any possibility of transcending the border, in reality, or through fantasy, into wild space. It is difficult to feel like a wild thing there.

The urban has swept away the wild. The thin strip of sand is unimportant. It will be covered and terraced someday to allow more opportunity to entrepreneurs.

“[B]eaches can support no constructions other than those that are forgotten,” Lefebvre says. Only the temporary and forgettable can be tolerated—“anything more and the structure would obliterate the space of enjoyment, in the process destroying its most characteristic feature: fluidity, transition.”

There is no reason to go to Zushi.

Shonan stretches on, though. There is Enoshima at one end (almost at Zushi), and Odawara at the other.

Enoshima has a small beach. It is used mostly by fully-clothed Tokyo daytrippers soaking their ankles, or by Chinese tourists, who take pictures of themselves eating various novelty ice creams (shirasu soft cream seems popular, as I recall).

At the castle town of Odawara, the beach is usually too cold to swim. Maybe it is because of the mountains. Most travel that far out to visit the hideous ferrocrete castle, the hot springs, and the kamaboko factories. (I like Atami and the ruins of the resort town that went bust three decades ago, but it doesn’t count as Shonan.)

There is a lot in between.

There is not much sand. This country cleaned up most of its coast. It dumped concrete over everything. The rivers are all cement canals.

The view of the ocean is blocked by an elevated highway. Failed development projects hint at what dreams people have had for it. Shonan is not beautiful, generally.

But there is a Shonan lifestyle, somehow. It is practiced by men that live out there to surf and fish in the limited free time they have between long hours and punishing commutes into the city. In beach towns, you can find their pretty, tanned wives and daughters working shifts at Chinese restaurants and Family Marts. Their sons become surfers. There are retirees that tan themselves golden.

I thought once that I could live that Shonan lifestyle. I found an apartment close to Hiratsuka, a beach whose width and flatness made it the first choice to land an amphibious force for a strike on Tokyo. I rode my bike down to the beach everyday in the summer. I tanned myself brown. My wife was busy in those months with other things. So, I was free to learn to surf.

I could never commit to it. I could not afford to live near Shonan just for convenient jouissance. In fact, it got old fast. I no longer celebrated getting off my bike at Hiratsuka. I moved to the city.

It is better to live away from the beach.

Oiso is a neglected beach. It is hidden by the same elevated highway. It is too far from the city to have many trippers. It is not ideal for surfing.

Parents with children mostly go to a nearby water park, which has at its center a long, shallow pool. It is called Oiso Long Beach and admission costs fifty dollars. There is a cheaper municipal outdoor pool nearby. The prefectural government erected a glass cube from which to sell local seafood.

Oiso is another example of an abandoned modernization, or a partial modernization. It started, from the descriptions I’ve read, as a series of linked pools, installed at the request of Baron Matsumoto Jun, who had heard about the practice from military physicians trained under the Dutch. Nobody swam in the ocean before that, unless they needed to.

All of that infrastructure was torn down. The water park is the last remnant.

The healthy beach is dead.

Oiso feels wild. It is often deserted. It is home mostly to local kids that come out to swim, to collect junk, crabs, and sand dollars. It is a place for single mothers that put up flimsy tents over their toddlers and lay out on blankets nearby. High school kids come down and wade out in their clothes. High school athletes run drills and wrestle in the surf.

Two shacks under the highway sell cans of beer and fried food. There is a muddy shower on one side, where people scrub the black volcanic sand out of their hair and bathing suits.

The people there are more beautiful than those that can be glimpsed in the city’s gymnasiums. Their skin is dark. They are more likely to be well-muscled and slim. They go to the beach to show their bodies to people. I don’t feel ashamed studying the women that spread themselves on the sand, or who linger in the beach shower, or who carefully, under an oversized T-shirt, change their clothes. I hope I am worthy of being studied by them, or envied by other men.

It is fascinating to see people captivated by what is around them. I watched a pair of girls—sixteen, seventeen, maybe older—walk carelessly into the waves, get knocked over, and walk back to do it again. They were at it for an hour. Near them, a young mother in a bikini was absorbed in hand digging a canal. Her son, about five or six, neglected, distracted himself with a soccer ball. Kids near the pier chased crabs.

Even if you are not brave, you can swim out quite far. A long concrete pier for the fishermen shelters it from heavier waves. It is shallow for a quarter mile out.

If you feel more adventurous, right around the corner is Terugasaki, where the waves are much higher. It is nice to swim sometimes on Terugasaki. It is nice to feel a bit of danger. It is good to put your foot down and feel nothing. The beach is always deserted. Very few make it past the illegal barbecues collected under the overpass beside the beach. Kids sneak down from the nearby apartment blocks to hide among the tetrapods to make out or smoke cigarettes.

I feel wild after I return from the beach. I have been attacked by the elements. I have experienced what is as close as one can experience within an easy subway ride to the pre-urban. I have possibly risked my life.

I would like to go again tomorrow.

I have not read Lefebvre, but it sounds similar to thoughts I've had. The beach, the real one out there on the coast and not just some piece of watery sand on the local waterway, is a little slice of titanic permanently wild landscape. Civilization can't really exist there. You can come with all manner of physical ambition to dig the place up and rebuild it in your image, and it will all be gone at the next high tide. If you are too hot you can go into the water, if too cold you can lie in the sun. You can wrestle with poseidon or just rest. There is always much to explore as the alien sea life washes up or is revealed by the tide. I think camping on wild beaches a lot formed my worldview and temper towards civilization to a large extent. I think it was a positive influence, but can never be sure.