Okinawa culture shock

Last year marked my second Christmas in Japan in a row, and instead of hunting for snow and Santas-on-a-boat in Tokushima, this time around I went south. Far south. To Okinawa.

The idea was to have my first warm Christmas ever and spend as much time scuba diving as possible. I booked my trip with Reef Encounters, an English-speaking dive company located in Chatan, about 45 minutes north of the airport and central Naha. With Christmas craziness (trying to find presents, make cards, and mail everything out in time, not to mention planning entertaining classes on the subject), Saki being sick (in what turned out to be an oops-I-ate-the-mouse-toy-whole-and-now-need-surgery-to-remove-it incident), and hosting some Christmas-y parties, I was too busy to make detailed plans and asked Reef Encounters to make reservations at a cheap hostel for me.

Walking around looking for the dive shop and directions for my hostel, I was a little shocked-- it seemed like a relatively suburban or at best urban sprawl-y area, but there were so many foreigners everywhere, women with small children and babies and African-Americans, all strolling along by the shore. [I don`t mean to stereotype, but after living in a rural Japanese island for over a year, it was quite a sight. I think I`ve only seen foreign children once before in my stay here, on the mainland in a McDonald`s, and I still remember the way the light made their stark-blond hair seem blinding. And as for any foreigners with a dark skin tone-- well, they`re just as rare.] It was a sunny, warm day, and everywhere I looked, foreigners in flip-flops and tank tops speaking English.

Later I learned that the dive shop and Chatan itself is right next to one of America`s larger Okinawa military bases. The families taking a walk probably lived very close by. There`s a lot of controversy over the bases in Okinawa and, indeed, all American military presence in Japan. It`s a complicated subject and I`m not an expert, but I can say that it certainly lends an international and, for me, rather home-y feeling to that part of mainland Okinawa.

The area around Chatan has a multitude of international restaurants, including Mike`s, the same American-style Mexican chain restaurant (everything smothered in real cheddar cheese and oozing sauces) that I found in Sasebo last July for my birthday dinner. I learned that it`s a chain that was started by a former American military person and only found near American bases with the idea of attracting military personnel stationed in Japan. Chatan is also the first place in Japan that I`ve seen graffiti, although once I started looking for it it was all over mainland Okinawa.

I`ve repeatedly heard Okinawa refered to as a very unique place in Japan and occasionally as not a very Japanese place (as if Kyoto was a 10 on a scale of 1-10 of Japanese-ness and everything else falls somewhere lower, is less authentic). Depending on how you look at it, there is some truth to this.

Historically, Okinawa (plus the southern islands of what is now Kagoshima Prefecture, including Amami Oshima) was its own domain, the Ryukyu Kingdom. It seems that they ruled themselves quite nicely for awhile, in a good geographical location for trade (or traders` pit-stops) between China and Japan. In the 1300`s it became a tributary state to China (read: it sent China money/goods to be left alone or minimally under their protection), and in the 1600`s after threat of invasion from Kagoshima`s Satsuma clan, it started paying tribute to Japan as well. Throughout all, the Ryukyu islanders maintained their own language and dialects thereof, but during the Meiji Restoration (late 1600`s), Japan declared the Ryukyu islands to be part of Japan, not just a tributary state. China wasn`t in a position to dispute this, and Japan stormed in with its new education system and forced the Ryukyu inhabitants to learn standard Japanese. These days, very few young people can speak any of native Ryukyu languages/dialects, although some of the older generation still only speak a Ryukyu language.

After WWII, America made Okinawa one of their protective states, which was perhaps justified since the war had completely devastated nearly everything. The US maintained control until the early 1970`s, when (according to the dive master at Reef Encounters, an expert on US military involvement in Okinawa) America allowed Okinawa to take a vote on the future of its status. It could become its own nation again, remain an American protective-state, or revert to being part of Japan. Okinawa voted to become part of Japan again.

If you also take into consideration how far some of the islands are from one another and the western-most island, Yonaguni, is in within sight of Taiwan on a clear day... it`s easy to see how Okinawan culture has great potential to differ from the mainland.

Although I spent most of my time scuba diving and didn`t have as much time as I would have liked doing tourist-y things and learning about native Okinawan customs, I did notice a few small things that seem native to the islands. For one, jasmine tea is usually served in restaurants in place of mainland Japan`s green tea. There are also shisa, or the traditional Ryukyu version of the guardian lion-dog, everywhere. Outside of the tourist shops, I saw them most frequently in rural areas as part of a gate into a front yard, like an outdoor genkan (entryway). They always come in pairs with one on each side of the gate, much like the Korean lion-dogs found outside of Kyushu Shinto shrines.

A few more Okinawa tidbits before moving onto my own personal adventures in the next blog post-- in addition to being the most concentrated area of 100-plus-year-olds in Japan (a country known for its longevity in general), Okinawa is also the poorest of the prefectures. Given Japan`s relative wealth, this may not be saying much, but I did notice an abundance of street-venders, spreading their hand-made jewlery and other wares on plastic tarps on the side-walk. It`s not a common sight in Japan. There was also one woman who had trained a cat to sit on a chair of bar stool-height and prop its paws on the back of the chair. Many Japanese people lined up to take their picture with this costumed cat and gave the woman money for doing so. It`s the closest to begging that I`ve seen in Japan, not including Buddhist monks or people on religious pilgrimages.

... so much for background, more to come later on scuba diving and personal adventures!