Days pass, and this week was much like the last. I went in the ministry, I taught English, I practiced Chinese, I worked on my degree, I tried to stay cool.
Side note: That restaurant is really cool. It's Japanese style; I'm not sure what it's called in English, if anything, but the name translates something like "hot iron counter grill". You order a meat and two vegetables, they fry it up on the counter (which is indeed hot and made of iron) in front of you, and you carefully eat it with chopsticks. Delicious!
I am getting better at teaching in my kindergarten. Teaching large groups of children is a different skill than teaching just one or two children at a time, particularly when the class' skill level is not even. Progress is being made, though, and every day I get a little better!
But of course, something did happen. It would be a very boring post if I just ended it like that!
I originally arrived in Taiwan on a student visa, good for six months. Taiwan and America have a very good relationship, so normally Americans do not need a visa to enter Taiwan; but I had received a scholarship, and one of their rules was I had to get an actual visa into the country. That worked great for as long as I was studying at the Chinese Culture University, but now that my class has ended I am not eligible to keep extending it.
That's not too bad of a problem, though; like I said earlier, Americans don't really need a visa to enter Taiwan. When you arrive in the country, you are allowed to stay for 90 days, and do almost anything you want- get a driver's licence, rent property, buy and sell things, even some forms of work.
This kind of thing is common in Chinese culture. For another example, officially you cannot transform a tourist visa directly into an ARC, a long term residence permit- you must leave the country, get a work visa, then transfer. However, there is a desk at the Taiwan Immigration Office that does literally nothing except transform tourist visas into ARCs.)
Anyway, the reason I mention all of that mess is because it's been 90 days since I went to Hong Kong with Harry, and it's time for me to leave once again. This time, I chose to go to Okinawa, Japan's southernmost province. One of the sisters in my congregation is from Okinawa, so she gave me some contacts; it's a fairly cheap flight from Taiwan; and, it only takes about 90 minutes to fly there. With those things in mind, I bought my ticket and flew out of Taipei early last Wednesday morning.
After going through customs, I was greeted by a friendly face!
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| Kiyonori Toma, in front of the steps to his house |
Kiyonori is a Japanese brother who has lived on Okinawa his whole life. He's been studying English for about a year, including three months in Singapore- good thing, since my Japanese is pretty much nonexistent- and very hospitably donated some of his time to help me around.
I was only there for two days, one night. I wish I could have stayed longer, but a variety of things made that impossible. Since I was staying such a short time, I only brought my backpack with me as luggage, and even that was mostly Taiwanese gifts for people. When Kiyonori saw that I brought such a small bag, he worriedly asked me if I brought dress clothes with me... because as it turns out, he was the conductor in field service that day, and we needed to book it to the group!
I didn't know that, so obviously I didn't bring any nice clothes with me. We hopped in his car (a tiny little Daihatsu) and went to his nearby house, where he began bringing some of his clothes to me to see if any fit. In the end, we found a shirt that, although a little tight, would work; but there was just nothing to be done about my legs. (The stereotype is that Asians are shorter than Western people; there's some truth to that, but we're not just taller, we're all-around bigger, and I don't just mean fatter.)
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| Territory in Okinawa |
So I ended wearing a tight white shirt, a tie and my jeans to meet the group, which they were surprisingly happy with! It was Japanese ministry, which meant that I was absolutely no help to anyone- I stood behind Kiyonori and tried to look polite. (My Japanese consists of "Can you speak English?" "Sorry, no Japanese." "One beer, thank you".) However, the friends out in the ministry were very welcoming, and full of questions about Taiwan, and the Chinese field, and once it came out that I used to be a Bethelite they had a million questions about all the changes happening in New York.
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| Two of the sisters with us that morning |
Although I wasn't much use to the people in the territory, it was nice to be able to give news to the Okinawan brothers and sisters and give them some encouragement. As an added benefit, Kiyonori got to practice his translation!
After the ministry, Kiyonori and I drove back to his house, changed clothes and walked over to the Okinawa Monorail, which we rode into the city of Naha. We planned on meeting another brother, Yuki Honda, at a well-known tourist spot called Kokusai Jie (International Street).
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| Monorail Station |
The weather was fantastic, which was very fortunate. The week before, they'd just suffered through a pretty big series of storms, and as of the time of writing this both Taiwan and Okinawa will be hit by a typhoon in less than 48 hours!
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| Kokusai Jie |
Yuki picked us up right on time, and by "picked us up" I mean he drove by and we jumped into his car without him actually stopping. Yuki is originally from the city of Kagoshima, on the southernmost island of the Japanese Home Islands (Kyushu). He moved to Okinawa six years ago, and right after moving he was convinced to join the Okinawa English congregation. From the way he spoke about it, he has had nothing but good feelings about this decision!
The Okinawa English has only 40 publishers, and they preach almost exclusively to the 12,000 or so American soldiers stationed on the island. (When America invaded Japan during WW2, Okinawa was the only populated island they actually captured before Japan surrendered. America ceded Okinawa back to Japan in the late 70s, but they kept the military base they built and are still using it to this day.) He says that although he was a bit nervous with the idea of preaching to soldiers, it turns out that they are usually very humble, friendly and willing to talk. Most of them are from poorer backgrounds, without much education, and happy to make some local friends.
Although they can't go onto the base to preach- they are allowed to enter, but they need an escort and they can only go to visit one person, not to just randomly walk around- they have great success in the public witnessing work and even telephone witnessing. In fact, Yuki just had a study get baptized at the last assembly!
Anyway, it was lunchtime and we were all hungry, so Yuki drove us to a really nice restaurant he knew of about an hour outside Naha (which is about as far from Naha as you can get- Okinawa is a small place).
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| Restaurant patio |
The scenery was beautiful. Okinawa is surrounded by coral reefs, which stained the sea a gorgeous light blue, the sun was shining, there was a warm breeze...
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| Kiyonori striking a pose |
While we waited for a table, I wandered around their garden for a little while.
Also, check out this spider!
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| As big as my hand! |
You can't tell from the picture, but its web was bright yellow! Wikipedia says it's a kind of 'banana spider', and not very poisonous, but I still wouldn't want one in my house!
Eventually they had a table open up. We gratefully and immediately entered and, at Yuki's suggestion, ordered Thai food. Delicious Thai food!
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| Finally, a picture of Yuki! He does exist! |
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| As do I! |
After stuffing our faces for a while, we discussed what we wanted to do next. The absolute best thing to do on Okinawa, apparently, is scuba dive- they have amazing coral reefs teeming with fish, and Yuki knew one particular cave you could dive into that is amazing. Unfortunately, I don't know how to scuba dive, and you have to sign up in advance for classes... also, it was already 3pm, so we wouldn't have time to do much diving.
So instead we went to check out an awesome castle!
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| Shuri Castle's front gate |
Originally, Okinawa was its own nation called Ryukyu. It ruled over the archipelago that shares its name, the Ryukyu Islands, with Okinawa being the biggest one by far. Although it started out completely independent, by the 1400s it was basically a puppet state of Ming China- the king paid the Ming tribute, the Ming didn't invade them, and patrolled Ryukyu's waters to keep pirates away. In the late 1600's, China's power had waned a bit, and Japan took advantage of this to invade Ryukyu and claim the islands for Japan.
Although this undoubtedly was a bad time for the citizens of Ryukyu, it was actually overall a boost to their economy. See, at that time Japan was very strictly isolationist- no trade with the outside world, period. But Ryukyu was still technically its own nation, so it could trade with the world just fine... and it was technically inside Japan, so it could trade with Japan too. Basically, for a couple hundred years, most goods imported into or exported out of Japan passed through Okinawa, which made the locals quite rich.
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| Inner gate of Shuri Castle- note how the steps are slanted outwards. This made it easy for boiling oil to pour onto would-be invaders, and made it more comfortable for the king to be carried on palanquin! |
During this period, Shuri Castle was the seat of government for the Ryukyu Kingdom/Province, and although comparatively small it manages to be very imposing!
In the late 1800's, as Japan started opening up to the world and industrializing, Okinawa lost their trading advantage but was still fairly prosperous until World War II, when the Americans basically bombed the entire island into the stone age. Even Shuri Castle was obliterated, save for a few features of the basement and dungeon; the current castle was rebuilt in the 1990s based on old pictures and plans of the castle that had been taken to the Home Islands. Although it's a little disappointing that the castle is just a recreation, I really wasn't in any position to complain about it... actually, I had to apologize twice to people while touring it! (I'm politically neutral, I swear! How do you say that in Japanese?)
We arrived at a good time. Right after buying our tickets and entering the castle courtyard, a traditional Ryukyu dance started, so we got seats and watched!
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| The have bamboo clickers they click with each step... |
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| She performed a fan dance based off of the Karate martial art... |
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| ...and she has a stick. |
It was art, I'm sure. Actually, even the Japanese brothers with me didn't seem to understand their art, which made me feel better. It was very graceful, but too slow to really be called a dance... but I'm sure it enriched me in some way. Probably.
Across from the dance exhibit was the main castle itself:
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| The dragon above the doors looks scared |
We were allowed to go inside, after taking our shoes off (Japan), and look inside. It was a bit bare- the structure itself has been rebuilt, but they're still recreating furniture and stuff- but very cool! One thing I noticed is that the inhabitants of Ryukyu were really, really short. I am often in danger of hitting my head in Taiwan, but I seriously had to hunch over to fit through their doorways inside that castle.
The one room they had managed to furnish was, naturally enough, the throne room:
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| The sign translates to something like "Ryuku's Eternal Throne Amidst Mountains and Earth" |
The king rarely actually used this room unless he was receiving some delegation from foreign lands- he had a much smaller office that looked way more comfortable he used for day-to-day business.
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| View of Naha City from the castle |
After the castle, Kiyonori had to leave and get to work unfortunately... Yuki and I carried on bravely without him.
We went back to Kokusai Street, since Yuki thought it was worth seeing (and I wanted to pick up some small gifts for people back in Taiwan), and arrived right as the sun began to set.
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| Kokusai |
It's called Kokusai, International, Street because it was the first street to be completely rebuilt after the American invasion, and it was mostly rebuilt by the Americans. They had souvenir shops, local candy (they have a kind of brown sugar rock candy that is delicious), local booze, t-shirts... they also have a kind of glassware they they make out of recycled soda bottles from the military base, which is surprisingly pretty!
We went to get some dinner:
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| Meat! |
So this delicious restaurant is set up like this: each table has a gas grill set in it with a chimney and everything. You order meat and vegetables, which are brought raw to your table, you grill them to perfection and eat them straight off the fire. Delicious! It was all-you-can-eat, which was even better!
I also learned about an interesting cultural thing here. In Japan, when you order a beer, you will also get a small dish to go with the beer- vegetables, or peanuts, or fried rice, or something. You can't say no to this dish, it comes with the beer. But they charge you for it. So just accept that your beer is actually a combo meal.
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| Yuki Honda and his, disappointingly, Suzuki |
After a good night's sleep in Yuki's apartment,, we woke up bright and early to be picked up by another brother and sister from the English, John and Suzuka Bennett.
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| Naturally, in a rental car place. |
John is a South African who moved to Okinawa eight years ago to support the English here and has loved every minute, especially once he met Suzuka. He's the only native English speaker on the body of elders, so besides being a great help in his personal ministry he allows the whole congregation to do better in their target field. It was great meeting them, and Suzuka's onigiri were delicious!
That's one thing I love about our worldwide brotherhood: I came to this place, Okinawa, not knowing a single person, and I left just a day later having made all kinds of friends. We traded numbers and addresses, we'll keep in touch, and of course if anyone comes to Taiwan I'll make sure they have a place to stay.
After I got back to Taiwan I got back into the swing of things pretty fast. Eating some real Japanese onigiri gave me an idea, though: they didn't look very hard to make, and they were delicious. I bet I could make some! So this Sunday, when Paul and Jessica had a get together at their house, I boldly promised I would make onigiri for everyone!
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| Look what I made! |
They're little balls of rice, seasoned, usually with meat filling inside- I chose tuna- and wrapped in some seaweed so you can eat them. Simple and delicious! Mine were about a 70% success. They took a while because I didn't know what I was doing, but they tasted great- their biggest flaw was they didn't stick together like they should, so instead of being hand food they were chopsticks food. Next time I'll use actual Japanese sticky rice instead of just trying to make Taiwanese rice sticky!
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| The dinner. Fun! |
And on the way home that night, Joel and I ran across this cool little alley:
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| Ominous or lucky? |
So yeah, Okinawa was fun. I was more expensive than I had hoped, but it was great, I made new friends, I ate cool food, and everything worked out well. If anyone would like more information about the Okinawa English, let me know and I will give you Yuki's email address- he said he'd be happy to help any brothers out who are thinking about coming over.
I'll try not to blow away until next time!
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