My reason for coming to Miyazaki is to experience Oceandome, an indoor seaside. The idea that things cannot be improved upon is anathema to many Japanese, and though the real seaside is just a couple of hundred yards away, across a golf course, billions have been spent here to make something even better. Just think about it, there are so many awful things that a seaside holiday is better off without: tsunami, Korean submarines, rip tides, sharp rocks, dumpers, sharks, jelly fish, broken bottles, sunburn, sand flies, jet skis, even sewage. Holidays can be hell. Oceandome protects us from all these horrors, and its ovoid form says it all.

Over breakfast in the hotel, I ask the waitress if she has ever been to Oceandome.

‘Once,’ she says. ‘But I didn’t swim.’

‘Was it enjoyable?’

‘Certainly,’ she replies, diplomatically. The hotel and Oceandome are all part of the same huge complex, Seagaia. She was probably taken there as part of her training.

Satomi arrives at the hotel in a flurry of luggage and sunglasses. We spend almost half an hour at the front desk, rearranging my account with the receptionist who, while quite accommodating at a moral level, is completely unprepared at the procedural level. Three of her colleagues join her to assist in the complex accounting manoeuvre. Upstairs Satomi unpacks her several bikinis and wampiisu and then we catch the shuttle bus to Seagaia.

The Seagaia brochure is a marvel of compressed information. I count forty-five different prices before I give up. And it is all unnecessary, because as soon as I am spotted in the vicinity of the dome a brisk young man in a baby blue suit comes out and immediately begins briefing me on what to do, where to do it, and how much it all costs, regardless of the fact that I have a perfectly good and conspicuously pretty Japanese interpreter on my arm. The simplest thing is to just follow his program. We soon find ourselves in a foyer, made strange because outdoor shoes and bare feet cross paths here, and then I temporarily part company with Satomi to go into the men’s changing room, and thence to the pool area. I see several people, predominantly women, glancing at the thin matting of hair on my chest. As is usual these days, I am the sole gaijin present. Emerging in a bright blue, yellow and pink bikini, Satomi looks gorgeous, and makes me feel quite proud. I slip my arm around her deliciously bare waist as we take a look-around, but she is not comfortable with it and after a few minutes takes my hand away.

The room that contains the pool is large – probably as big as two football fields, end to end. The huge vault of the ceiling is high overhead, the biggest retractable roof on Earth. At the back of the pool there is a wall with a sky painted on it, reminding me of the scene in The Truman Show where Jim Carrey’s boat runs into a similar wall. As in Venusfort, the lighting changes so that the wall appears to mimic the daily changes of the sky. The waves issue from the back of the pool and come in different varieties; they can make left and right hand breaks, or break in the middle. They can even make a half-decent tube for a second or two. The waves are tailored for surfing or body boarding, depending on the time of day (these things happen according to a strict schedule). The surfing waves seem to be made by first releasing a smallish wave to create a backwash, and following this with a larger wave to break over it. The one unnerving feature of the pool is the large and malevolent maelstroms that form at the back when water is being sucked up into the wave tanks, in preparation for the next wave. These vortices froth and swirl viciously, and all swimmers are kept a safe distance from them by a floating boom and lifeguards who patrol on surf-skis.

The beach is made of small white pebbles, not sand. They stick rather comically to anyone who sits on them. Near the beach line these pebbles are actually held in place by plastic sheets, to stop the waves sucking them back into the pool and destroying the gradient. As we wade out we pass over these plastic sheets and then feel the concrete floor underfoot. Satomi finds this rather distasteful, and wrinkles her nose to show it. The water doesn’t appear to wet Satomi’s naturally hairless skin, it just rolls up into droplets that fall off her. I’ve never seen anything like it, but she says her father and brother have the same skin, so it must be an inherited characteristic.

Fake rocks, islands, palm trees, caves, streams and an active volcano complete the illusion. Music plays continuously, on a ridiculously short loop. I hear a muzak version of Peter Frampton’s Baby I love your way five or six times. Announcements are in Japanese, English, and Chinese. One of these announcements is an invitation to join ‘us’ for a show.

The show is vaguely Rio de Janeiro mardi gras, and features a small troupe of Caucasian dancers moving desultorily and miming to well known songs. The girl from Ipanema should have been performed, but wasn’t. An old white-haired man occupies a table, not eating, and forces a small family to try to eat standing up. A waitress asks him to move to seats at the back but he refuses, buying a cake instead. A few moments later two of the singers walk out to shake hands with the audience. As one of them nears his table he bolts and stands at the counter until she has passed.

In the afternoon, a concert starts up. It is an Okinawan rock band, who sound like stable mates of the Gipsy Kings. Satomi and I want to swim while listening to them, but this mix of sensations is not permitted, for some reason. A lifeguard sternly points us back to the beach with his paddle. There is no need for dry ice, the place is so balmy it steams already – even though we are still in the middle of winter. Large raindrops plop down from the roof – the result of heavy condensation. The band divides the audience into halves and encourages them to cheer in competition with each other. The audience, to its credit, remains indifferent to such hackneyed tricks.

While listening to the band, I detect a strong odour of coconut oil, which evokes memories of Reef Oil, which in turn evoke strong memories of dangerous days on Sydney beaches, dodging the sharks while trying not to swallow the dead seaweed and raw sewage.

In fact, there is a whiff of something rotting at Seagaia. The complex was built on 1980s euphoria and megalomania, rather than sound planning and risk management. Of the project’s $4 billion cost, $2 billion is still owing to creditors, and attendances are falling. There is no realistic hope of merely reducing the debt for at least five years. Banks have started to defect, so that the local prefectural government has had to start making financial contributions, and the three-thousand workers have all had to accept wage cuts. The heady dream is suffering from being too much of just that in the face of unpredictable financial realities.

We return to the hotel room and shower. Before we go out to eat, Satomi is keen to have sex. We do, once. She grudgingly concedes this is sufficient until after dinner.

At the restaurant I make a meaty mistake, ordering what I take to be a baked potato but is actually a ball of hamburger meat. The plastic models of food at the door are deceptive. I leave the meat and pick at everything else. I stifle a little annoyance at Satomi, for I feel that she should have warned me that the food I pointed at was a meat dish, but I realise that to her vegetarianism is slightly incredible and something of an eccentric whimsy on my part.

Our waitress is like a robot. Everything she says has the tone of a public announcement, and it is all straight out of the keigo handbook that is given to employees who deal with the public. She is so loud and expressionless that I can’t help feeling that she is a machine. I feel like doing something outrageous to her, just to see her automaton façade crack, but I don’t. I reserve my outrages for a more appreciative Satomi, with whom I have a long, drunken and salacious evening in the privacy of our hotel room.