Adventures in Japan

My Name is Not Susan Or: I Got Puked On Yesterday

This is the post where I wrap up our Okinawan adventure (and share with you the pictures our posts lacked). I know it's been a week since we got back but it has been a very busy week. For example, I got puked on. The pants that got puked on are ruined. Good thing I paid extra for the stain and spill resistant khakis. Thanks for nothing Lee. So I only have one pair of pants for work. You see... I brought 3 pairs of dress pants with me when we came to Japan and they are all too dressy to wear whilst playing around with kids. I brought 2 of khakis as well. 2 days ago I split the crotch on one pair while at work. I had to buy another pair on my lunch break. Yesterday, I was vomited on, and the stains didn't come out. So I have to do some pants shopping tomorrow.

I got a little sidetracked there. The whole vomit thing kind of bothers me. I kind of thought it was funny until I learned about the loss of pants. Stupid anonymous barfer.

But back to Okinawa. More specifically Naha. Let's get even more specific, and talk about CamCam, the place where we stayed. It was a fairly new guest house. We could tell because they were still building it while we were there. The mural in one of the lounges kept changing on an almost daily basis.



They finished off another lounge, bathroom and shower during our week long stay, bringing the total of each to two. There was only ever one kitchen, and it wasn't ever really clean. Neither of the bathrooms or showers were all that good. There were drainage problems. The dorms were crowded. Not that they were always full of people, but the bunks were all attached to one another, and the bunks themselves weren't super huge. Like a capsule hotel but not. The guy next to me in the men's dorm snored incredibly, mind-shakingly loud. I don't think I got a single good uninterrupted night's sleep during our vacation. Let's break all these words up with some pictures. First is a picture of one of the dorms.


See, those are all bunks. Here's a picture of one of the bunks.


Not super cramped, but not spacious. Keep in mind that we had to keep our luggage in there with us because there was nowhere else to put it.

Back to words. It may sound kind of less than good. And I can see how some people would not like it, but it had such a great vibe. It was a guest house, which meant that there were people checking in and out all the time, but there was also a group of people who were there all the time and they were all awesome. We got free food and drinks all the time. We never wanted for conversation. There always something going in the lounge every night. Even if it was just everyone hanging out and messing around with the guitars and bongos. But they weren't annoying bongo/guitar players. See this picture?


You can't be a pretentious wanker musician with snack food up your nose. You just can't. Here's another picture.


There was only one person at CamCam who wasn't super cool. And he wasn't there all that long. And he was entertaining in his own way. I forget his full name, which is odd since he was repeating it all the time. I want to call him Kenzo Suzuki, but that's just because there's a wrestler with that name. Doesn't really matter, as he liked to be called Su-san. He knew a few English phrases and he just kept repeating them over and over. While wildly gesticulating and and bounding about. Su-san was a 41 year old balding Japanese man with something wrong upstairs.


His dream is to become the welterweight boxing champion. OK? He does 40 push-ups a day. OK? Sometimes he'd just whip off his shirt and start doing them while talking to you about his limited range of topics. Internet, email, homepage. He didn't drink alcohol, only mineral water and he smoked Kent cigarettes because his nine year old son's name is Kento. He might be a mail man. Hard to say. He was interesting at first. Excuse me! You look really nice, OK! You look gorgeous! OK? But by the end of the second day of his stay, we were hiding from him.

Luckily he was taken away by the police on the third day.

The people at CamCam were always teaching us Okinawan slang and always wanted to learn more English slang. That made for some good nights of drinking. One of the local Okinawan liquor specialities has a snake in it. I never tried it. I would have, but it was stupid expensive. I don't imagine that the snake adds much to the alcoholic content. The only way I'm gonna pay 13 bucks for a shot is if I don't have to drink again for a good while. Here's a picture of the snake brewing process.


There's a hell of a documentary to be made about the roles of both Hawaii and Okinawa in WWII. Both had been a part of their respective countries for under a century yet they were the places where the main violence of the Japanese-American conflict occurred. Okinawa was about as peaceful a place as could be before joining up officially with Japan. It was an Asian gateway of sorts. So close to all the major Asian cultures, it was a trade hub. Then the Americans bombed the hell out of it. I'm not trying to bash America here, I'm just saying that large chunks of Okinawa's history are lost forever due to that bombing. The naval bunker we toured, which was the basically Okinawa's last stand, made my eyes want to get wetter. Also, the pictures I took there looked kinda nice.


Look at the colours, children, the colours. Now I'll bring the room back down.


This naval base is where hundreds of hundreds of men, lacking any real weapons to fight with, killed themselves rather than surrender.

There was a lot of suicide in Okinawa at the end of the war. Carla mentioned the schoolgirls and their teachers killed themselves. There was another tour we could have taken that stops at a beautiful seaside cliff. The cliff is famous because a lot of people threw themselves off it rather than face the American savages. Once again, I am not bashing Americans, just pointing out that the Okinawan people were led to believe that the invading Americans would rape, mutilate, and kill (not necessarily in that order) whoever and whatever was in their path.

There was a small museum/display at the entrance to the naval base that compared the firepower and casualties of both sides. There was a handy bar graph to further illustrate the point. It was a bit sickening. 200 656 dead Japanese (slightly less than half the population of the island of Okinawa), 12 560 dead Americans. 37 139 dead Okinawan civilians. I am so glad that my brain can't even begin to comprehend those numbers. Here's another number: 4.72. That's the amount of shells per person the Americans fired on Okinawa. I ain't no hippie, and I understand the need for war, but damn that hurts. I hope I haven't overstepped my bounds of being your charming internet tour guide of Japan.

There were countless unclaimed, unidentified corpses left at the end of the conflict. Okinawa, and Okinawans embraced their peaceful history and buried them all together and erected a peace memorial in the hopes that peace would someday prevail. The giant Buddha in the main building had an odd effect on me, I was both intimidated and calmed.


The paintings in the museum also made me want to get emotional. As we were on a rushed tour we could only glance at each painting, let them all just kind of wash over us.

The cave was cool. All sorts of neat formations, and it was BIG. Didn't like how a very large portion of a large portion of stalactites had been amputated to make room for the catwalk. Uncountable years of incremental growth destroyed and discarded so the tourists can rush through so they don't miss their bus. The Christmas lights were offensively, tackily cool. Maybe I'm just bitter because I didn't get a lot of cool pictures.




This is Carla by the gaudy, gaudy lights.


To be fair, here's an unflatering picture of me. See that curtain rod behind me? I hit my head on that stupid thing on a daily basis.

I'm going to talk about the cool people at CamCam again. We got hugs and well wishes when we left. That has never happened to us at any hostel before. The hugs were nice.

Okinawa is known for its crafts: its lacquerware, its glassware and its textiles. The glass blowing was mesmerizing. I was mesmerized. Wish I could post video to this page so you could see how efficient yet beautiful the whole process was. But if I could post videos, you might see what happens at Rock Rock or Karaoke. No one needs to see that. We have no pictures of the textiles or the lacquer, but rest assured, they were bright and striking and beautiful. Would that we were rich. I'll have to console myself with my awesome Okinawan shirt.





This is what it looked like out my window as we left Okinawa.

Wow, that was a tonne of words. In case you haven't had enough, Carla was finally able to post the last bits of what we all got up to while Nate & Trev were here. The new stuff starts January 26. The easiest way to go back and read it is to use the links to the weekly archives over there on the right. Or down at the bottom if you have a teery, tiny screen, which I imagine some of you do.

And now: more pictures.





Remember how we said we liked the curvy castle walls? Well here's a picture. You're welcome.


This is delicious, delicious french toast in a cup.


This is, I believe, a Spam (or low cost Spam equivalent) and cheese onigiri sushi.


This is the only beach we made it to. Oh well. See those footprints in the sand? That's where Carla carried me.



You could buy fish food out of vending machines in this garden. So all the fish always swam near the surface like sharks. They would follow you as you walked around the pond. If you ever stopped, they would stick their gaping maws out of the water.


It was disgusting and entrancing. I imagine this is what Cthulu's skin looks like.



These are pictures from our favourite 50's diner in Naha.