okinawa
A friend invited me to spend a few days with her in Okinawa, using a Japanese domestic-only birthday flight deal to get there and back.
It was sweet, I spent two days on the beach (where I got sunburned from under like 2 cm of sunscreen AND an umbrella, amazing) and some time sightseeing and getting ripped off by taxi-drivers.
In the evenings we went out, to a salsa bar the first night and a hip-hop club the second. Being as we were on Okinawa, home of Kadena American Military base and around 23,000 foreigners, clubbing (and the island in general) was bound to be filled with military types. In fact my friend made an admirer, and we almost got to go on base to take a look around, that would have been cool. But the guards shut us down, I guess we looked suspicious.
Until I went to Okinawa I had started to develop a theory that it must be like living in paradise to be a JET on Okinawa. After visiting, I’ve pretty much decided exactly the opposite. To put it mildly, I think the American military makes an impact on people’s impression of foreigners, especially Americans, and while relations are more or less calm, they stop just short of friendly. You can tell.
A woman in a gift shop on Kokusai-dori told me, as an introduction, her story of surviving the war. She said she walked from Naha to Nago, the bottom of the island to the top, as a little girl. She said it took 10 days and they were starving. She told me the reason she was so short (maybe five feet tall) was that she had been undernourished for so many years as a child. She seemed eager to tell her story, I imagine she doesn’t often get American visitors who speak any Japanese and she took the opportunity as if she’d been bursting to let this out. But when two Marines walked in asking if we knew directions to a music store, she laughed and joked about their short hair, and called over an assistant to draw them a map.
And the Americans? I asked my dance partners whether they were liking Japan and they all said no except for one. And one other, who said “yes because the base is just like America.” Go figure. I guess since most of the people stationed there are young 20-somethings, the military mostly consists of a whiney presence that complains when things seem too Japanese, so they don’t exactly give the Okinawans any reason for showing much love.
I had a good time, and a blast with my friend, but I’m glad I don’t live there. I wouldn’t want to be mistaken for military everywhere I went.
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