It all started on a dark and stormy night (or rather a fairly overcast midmorning) as I departed for Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, to visit my last years host family, the Mizukamis.
I was travelling alone for the first time in all 3 of my trips on Japan's hellishly complicated train network, but with trusty map and handwritten notes I embarked on the journey with confidence. I had to change trains twice, pass through close to 40 stations, and navigate my way through 4 stations' labyrinthine network of passages and walkways. As difficult as this may seem, the Japanese rail network does its best to help you get your bearings. All the trains tell you in Japanese and English (not that I needed that) which station you are approaching, and which line the train belongs to, so with that assistance I was able to find my way to Tsukuba station at 11.30, right on time.
There I was met by my brother Ryo, it was very good to see him after 14 months of only being able to facebook one another. We headed to our house briefly to drop off my bag, before heading out on our bikes to Tsukuba University to go to their festival. Tsukuba University Campus is massive, its students often get lost, so as non university students we had little clue as to where we were. However, we were guided by booming music resonating from the festival as it echoed between the buildings and roads of the campus.
I visited the university last year as part of my 2 week sister school exchange, in the hope of getting some international students from NZ studying at Tsukuba, so it was quite cool to be able to say to Ryo 'Hey, I remember that place!" and "I was there last year".
Guided by the music we parked our bikes and walked towards the first of the stalls, only to be met by a person who looked like this-
Them Japanese be CRAZY!
There were literally hundreds of stalls, offering food, games, drinks, crafts and performances. With so many to choose from we had to go through the directory and select the ones we really wanted to see, and then use the map to work out how to get there. For lunch we had okonomiyaki, gyoza and a shoyu rice stick, all of which were 'totemo oishikatta' (delicious)
After this we went to a football display, played a small game and inspected the Tsukuba University team, and then it was time to head home for a BBQ party.
Ryo and I at the football stall
Last year when I was staying with the Mizukamis, they hosted another dinner party with some of their friends coming round to meet me. This time, the same people came round and we spent the night on the Mizukamis BBQ veranda overlooking the Tsukuba fields, eating whole grilled fish, BBQed chicked, sweet potato and mushrooms, all very good. Ryo and I ended the night watching South Park, had a good laugh at half past 12 on Sunday Morning.
At a far more reasonable hour on Sunday morning Ryo and I rose for breakfast, and then headed out once more to visit a mall and then go back to the University festival. Returning to some of the places (however mundane) that I visited last year gave me quite a feeling of nostalgia, always pointing out, "oh we walked down that way last year'.
Day two at the university allowed my last years host brother to meet one of my current host brothers, Tomo, who is currently studying at Tsukuba. Whilst we missed his piano performance, it was still good for them to be able to meet. After a few more performances, notably a rather/really awful acapella concert, we went to another mall that we visited last year, saw this again-
Apparently there is a local legend circulating that this rocket is for in case North Korea invades, the Japanese government will launch this bad boy right back at them. Not convinced though, I have to say.
Soon enough 4pm drew near, and with that so did my train. I packed my bag, had one last cup of green tea with my family, and then said farewell again to everyone, and boarded the train back home. Getting home was a slightly more complex process, the return station layout was a little different, but after a few minutes of pondering, I was back on course, and by 7.30 I was back in Ebina-shi.
This adventure was by no means the end, however, of my travels for the week. I had only just returned home and I was unpacking one bag, whilst packing another. In bed at 10.30pm, and awake at the quite-difficult-to-wake-up-at time of 4.00 am of Monday morning. Stumbling downstairs blearily, had an apple for breakfast, then made my way back to Ebina station to meet my friends Nonoka, Shiori, Iori, and Narumi. Why get up so early, and why were friends at the station? We were headed to Okinawa!
Okinawa is now Japan's tropical holiday spot, full of resorts, reefs, sun and crystal clear water, but 66 years ago it was the site of the last great battle of WWII, and indeed one of the bloodiest. The purpose of our school trip there was not only for the last glimpse of summer for another year, but also to reflect on the massive loss of human life on both sides of the conflict and to promote peace and cross cultural understanding.
At Haneda airport in Tokyo there were two hundred or so excited 16 and 17 year olds, many of whom had never been on an aeroplane before.
We took off in almost perfect style, one or two little bumps, though even that produced ear splitting screams from some of the girls, as seems to be the norm with them, the squeaky things. An almost two hour flight went by eventlessly, and we touched town to a fairly sweltering 30-something degree heat wave, plus 70-80 percent humidity, much like Ebina was when I arrived here in August. Each class boarded a bus, and the Peace Tour commenced. Our tour guide was dressed in a very funny pink and cream suit that seemed completely wrong on a tropical island, and I thought she rather looked like Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter.
First on the Peace Tour was the Himeyuri Peace Museum, the site of two all girls high schools where, during WWII, the students were mobilised to help nurse injured soldiers, plant crops, gather water, and assist the Japanese military on Okinawa in a supportive role. As the war reached Okinawa in 1945, this role put these 222 girls and 18 teachers on the front line as the Japanese fought an ultimately futile battle against the Allies. The movie we watched at school a few weeks ago about the Battle of Okinawa centred around these very same girls, and in the museum we read and saw many descriptions of the battle from their perspectives, and there were constant reminders of the dangers they faced, as their numbers were depleted. Okinawans have fought the mainland Japanese for decades following the war over the role of the Japanese military in the deaths of these girls, and indeed of many Okinawan civilians. As the battle began to come to an end, the Japanese soldiers gave civilians hand grenades for the purpose of suicide, and in one case many civilians drank milk laced with cyanide, something the Himeyuri girls had to witness. There is a room in the museum with the faces of the girls and teachers who perished in the Battle, either from the Allies' weapons, the Japanese military, or by suicide or disease, and I will not deny that I found myself weeping at this. Even for me, a New Zealander who has not connection to the Battle of Okinawa, in fact I am the first of my family to visit there, I found my sense of humanity connecting with these girls, who were the same age as me when they died, and the reason they died was because of a conflict that started thousands of kilometres away between people they probably had never heard of before. Walking out of the museum and its heavy sense of wasting human life, we came across one of the caves that the Himeyuri girls hid, and died in, along with other civilians and Japanese soldiers. The heiwa gamu 'Peace cave' is now a shrine to all those who died, and a monument to eternal peace in Okinawa.
Boarding the bus again, we headed to the Okinawan Heiwa Koen "Peace Park", which, like the Hiroshima Peace Park, is a vast expanse of land dedicated to the memory of the fallen and for the preservation of peace in the world.
We walked down a straight path, with a white tower to our left, a chain link to our right, and the ocean ahead of us. But before we could get to the edge of the park, we had to walk through 'The Cornerstone of Peace'
This part of the Peace Park is dedicated to every civilian who perished during the battle, and everyone of their names are written on these stones. There are approximately 120,000 names written on these stones, all of them civilians. Even to someone who couldn't read most of the names, the sheer mass of them proved quite an emotional experience, though not so much as the Himeyuri museum.
After passing through the Cornerstone of Peace, we got to the edge of the park, overlooking the southernmost point of Okinawa, and the last part of Okinawa to fall to the Allies.
It was at these rocks that many of the Himeyuri girls used grenades to kill themselves, and now the beach is an eternal monument to them and the others who died.
The Chain of Peace
As we left the Peace Park, the tropical heavens opened, and by this I mean it was torrential rain. That combined with wind meant it was like being hit by warm horizontal rocks. The last destination on our peace tour was a larger Heiwa Gamu, where many Okinawan civilians and soldiers hid from the carnage that the Battle produced.
Inside the cave were four large chambers, all with smaller ones feeding off of them. Some were used as kitchens, others as hospitals and operating rooms, and one cavern was the room where soldiers and civilians who had recieved terminal injuries were placed and left to die. In the silence and darkness, you could imagine the conditions in which these people died, and despite it being deathly quiet apart from the dripping of water, you could almost hear the dying screams of people 66 years dead.
The most haunting cavern, however, was the last one. A winding path lead to the surface, and so a thin ray of sunlight penetrated the cavern, but this still offered little illumination. Our guide shone the torch up towards the ceiling, where she pointed out the rock colours. Normally the cave was a greyish colour, but in this cavern, the rocks were tainted a heavy black colour, and in one spot, there was a bright red circle. She explained that, during the battle, a shell entered the cave through the exit hole, exploding in the cavern filled with civilians and wounded soldiers. The black was shell residue from the explosion, and the red was a metal dining plate that was thrown with such force from the explosion that it welded to the caverns ceiling, staying there for over 60 years. I found it strange that more people were weeping in the cave than at the Himeyuri Museum, the faces of all the girls did it for me, but as far as I was concerned, this cave was just a cave, albeit larger than any cave I'd been in before.
Exiting the cave through the very passage that fateful shell entered, we were once again doused with horizontal rain, rushing to get back into the bus, which took us back to our hotel.
With day one complete, we had dinner and then collapsed into bed, physically and emotionally drained
Breakfast on day two started at 7.20, and we were to leave the hotel at 9.00, so for some reason the other boys in my room decided to set their alarm for 6.00. Why they needed an hour twenty to get ready for breakfast, especially as the Japanese shower in the evenings, not the mornings, I do not know. Needless to say, I was ready before 6.30, and spent the next 50 minutes napping whilst my horrendously disorganised classmates did their hair. It saddens me to say that one, who will remain nameless, brought a hair straightener.
As we packed our bags to be sent to our next hotel, we once again got into groups, this time of 5, and were assigned a taxi driver, who became our chaffeur for the day. We would say where we wanted to go, and he would take us there, or would suggest some places and if we liked the sound of it, we would go there.
First we went to a glass bottomed boat to see some of Okinawa's vast fish and coral life from the comfort and dryness of a boat. The water got progressively bluer as we got out further, eventually turning into an almost sapphire colour, very pretty, and our driver would throw out little bits of food to draw the fish closer, saw hundreds of them no further than two metres away.
Following this, we went to Shurijyo, known in English as Shuri Castle, which is now a World Heritage Site, but during the Battle of Okinawa, it was the site of the Japanese military HQ. Completely destroyed by the Allies, it was rebuilt in the decades following, and now is back to its former glory.
I had 'visited' Shurijyo before coming to Okinawa, in the Xbox game Call of Duty: World at War.
However in this I was blowing the castle up, and the Japanese were not so friendly towards me. What surprised me though, was that the Call of Duty Shurijyo and the real life Shurijyo were more or less identical. Walking out into the main courtyard I was like 'hey, I've blown this place up before'.
Following Shurijyo we went to a very popular with the locals soba restaurant, at the recommendation of our driver, its specialties were pig foot and pig rib soba. Apparently it is very good for the skin, I guess the cellulose in the pork is good for skin, not entirely sure. But regardless, twas delicious, a very generous helping too! Also on offer were complimentary Okinawan doughnuts, not as sweet as the American variety (thank heavens), but still very good!
Last destination before our hotel was America Village, a large area of American themed shops and products, also had a ferris wheel. As I was in America in June, America Village certainly reminded me of it, but whilst my friends went shopping like crazy, I only bought an icecream, the pants I liked the look of (and at only 1000yen-$15ish, very cheap) were too small, alas. But nonetheless, it was quite entertaining to see all of the American stuff on display.
After this we headed to the hotel, said farewell to our awesome driver, and made our way to our rooms before going to the 9 course dinner.
This guy looks older, but had the mind of a 17 year old, full of innuendos and drove like a crazy. A good guy.
9 course menu anybody?
Day 3 was the exciting day of water sports, everyone donned their mizugi (togs) and readied themselves for a day at the beach. First on the menu for my group was swimming, so just frolicked in the water, kept safe from the box jellyfish and lionfish by the nets surrounding our little pool of water.
Following swimming my group went SCUBA diving, a first for many of us. Donning wetsuits we headed out to a pontoon several hundred metres offshore where we put on our oxygen tanks and gloves, before slipping into the water. We spent a few minutes on the bottom holding onto a rope whilst we got our bearings and got used to breathing, after which we went in pairs with a guide along the seabed to various reefs where we were given a small amount of 'esa' (animal food) and we proceeded to feed the fish. I found that the throwing motion would scare the fish away for a second or two, so instead decided to hold my hand out in front of me, esa between my forefinger and thumb, and a horde of fish came and swum around my hand no more than 30cm away from my face, in fact some even swum over my arms and body. I was immersed in brightly coloured fish. Whilst I didn't have an underwater camera, these are some of the fish that I saw, credit to whoever took the photos.
After the excitement of the diving we spent a couple of hours having lunch and generally relaxing in the sun, before heading out on the dragon boats. The dragon boats were inflatable tubes about 5 metres long with two rows of 'seats' for us to sit on, 4 on each side. We were towed by a jetski, whose driver seemed intent on making us flip over, twas good fun. I was lucky (or unlucky) enough not to fall off, however when the boat went up on one side at an angle, whilst my friends to my right were all doused in water, I was thrown a good distance into the air (a good time to decide to go hands free), only to plop back down where I was sitting before.
With the dragon boating ending heralded the end of the day at the beach for us, though it was by no means the end of the day. We showered and packed our bags for the departure the next day, had dinner, and then the Last Night in Okinawa revelry began. Lots of running through the hotel, jumping on beds, singing and dancing in rooms enused, and in my room one of the boys (remains nameless) who shared with me got a face mask.
Minus the cucumbers.
In the end one of their girlfriends and two of her friends stayed the night in our room, meaning that one of the boys, Yuya, had to sleep on the sofa for the entire night, a not especially comfortable experience I am led to believe. But I didn't mind, sleeping on my bed with a couple of stolen pillows, I was very comfortable indeed.
The last day was spent travelling by bus to the Okinawan capital, Naha, where we went shopping for souvenirs. Every shop it seemed sold Okinawan liquor, Awamori a powerful 40% rice based liquor,
and Habusu, a special type of Awamori, with added honey, spices, and pit vipers.
A few of the shops contained some oddities, such as some limited edition Star Wars paraphernalia,
as well as some Jurassic park memorabilia
As the time to go to the airport neared, we boarded the monorail from Naha city to Naha kuko, departing Okinawa at about 4.30pm. After a seemingly eternal series of train rides and buses, I arrived home at 8.30pm exhausted, quite pink, but very happy to have been able to go to Okinawa and see what it has to offer.
Okinawa is a living, breathing monument to peace after all the death and destruction that occured there 66 years ago. It is now a combination of memory, culture, and modern lifestyle, a true smorgasboard. Well worth a visit.
Plus:
I would like to thank the Japanese government for providing the scholarship that made my travels to Okinawa CONSIDERABLY cheaper, certainly freed up a lot of spending money, and also to Tsurumine High School for getting me on the trip at relatively late notice, but also to all my friends who tolerated my slow Japanese and helped me when the translation stuff was a bit much for me.
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