Naha is full of white mid-rises; it looks a bit like an entire city of mid-range beach hotels. This is partly because of the Battle of Okinawa. Many cities in Europe still have scars from battles and bombing raids of WWII. Central Naha has none. This is because it wasn't damaged in the war; it was completely destroyed.
For the casual tourist, Japan is a flash-card series of visual riddles. As a Japanese city, though, Naha has no obvious problems or dangers. It's like a misleading reconstruction of a 21st century city. It's missing pollution, crime, vandalism, litter, rudeness, haste, jaywalking, poverty, and indecorousness in any form. It's like the idea of the middle ages we might get from an open-air museum staffed by people with good teeth in freshly-laundered costumes who don't have plague and aren't drunkenly trying to murder each other or dying in childbirth. Its little two-car monorail adds to the theme-park feeling: It's efficient and useful, but oddly toy-like for a mass transit system.
Safety warnings are illustrated with cartoons. Sliding doors have stickers of bawling cartoon people who are squirting huge tears off at every angle because they got a hand caught. The monorail uses a cartoon crab with a bandaged claw. The cartoon characters warn you without straining the social harmony between you and them. Instead of "there's danger here, watch it", they say, "well, everything is fine. It's just, look at what happened to Clippy the Crab, here. You don't want to end up like Clippy, that's all. Ha! Look at his bandaged little claw! Have a great day."
The civility of the Japanese is wonderful, but Japanese etiquette always seems to require a huge amount of effort. This is a country where labour is expensive and automation relentlessly pursued. A block from my hotel, you can buy a haircut from a vending machine. (In fact, you can buy a ticket that entitles you to a haircut from a barber, though engineers somewhere are working 16 hour days to build a machine with a coin slot and a hole that says "insert head here".) But the main part of the job of almost anyone in public view seems to be to act out polite rituals.
Maintaining this system of etiquette is like pyramid- or cathedral-building -- an effort that drains off huge resources and seems mysterious to outsiders. "Japanese saleswoman" is a candidate for the most grueling job in the world. Deep-sea fishermen and coal miners would be broken in a week if they had to make themselves up like anime princesses and spend every day on their feet, bowing, smiling wide-eyed smiles, and endlessly repeating the same set of formulas and gestures.
One of the awkward things about travel in Japan is not having responses to these sorts of things. Someone from the hotel staff got off the elevator at a different floor; she turned back, beamed a thousand-watt smile, and bowed until the doors closed again. Smiling and nodding always feels inadequate, and bowing back doesn't feel like an option, so you rifle through the gestures you know for a possible response. The sheepish wave? The finger gun? The embarrassed grin? The thumbs-up? The wai? The salute? The Vulcan salute? The fishing reel? The disco point? The fist pump? The horns? The ASL signs for "elevator doors take a long time to close in your country"?
Outdoor vending machines are everywhere in Naha, as in Tokyo. No one with 120 yen in his pocket is ever more than a minute away from a can of cold Boss-brand coffee ("Boss is the Boss of them all since 1992"). The reason for this is that it's considered perfectly safe and reasonable to leave vending machines sitting around in alleys and parking lots. In principle, someone could vandalize or rob them, but this is Japan: Why would someone do that? Outdoor vending machines are less a Japanese quirk than something higher crime rates deprive us of in other countries.
I went to Shuri castle, capital of the old Ryukyu kingdom, two beautiful complexes of wooden buildings surrounded by parkland and a sloping wall of dark gray stone. Like everything else, it was destroyed in the war. In fact, it formed part of the Japanese defenses, and there's a moderately famous raising-the-flag photo from its capture by the Americans. It was rebuilt entirely in the 1990s. You can pad through the buildings, carrying your shoes in a little plastic bag.
Kokusai-dori, the 'international street', is a strip of tourist stores and restaurants, from which disorienting tangles of shopping arcades wind back into the city. Japan is the only country in the world in which tourist shops are not boring. The big stores compete on unexpectedness. They display bright grids of boxes that might hold literally anything that can be manufactured cheaply and stuffed into a small box. You want to bring them back as gifts just to find out what they are. There are more U.S. military types here than elsewhere; beefy American men in their early 20s, in groups of four, carefully well-behaved.
I didn't do as much in Naha as would have liked. Fighting off the Filipino cold virus ran me down. "Fighting off" might not be quite right; it was more of an abject surrender followed by the virus getting bored and finally leaving. The sort of state in which you put on a sock and try not to think about the other sock you have to put on, because that's the kind of long-term strategic planning you don't have the energy to undertake.
I left Naha and flew up to Seoul.
For the casual tourist, Japan is a flash-card series of visual riddles. As a Japanese city, though, Naha has no obvious problems or dangers. It's like a misleading reconstruction of a 21st century city. It's missing pollution, crime, vandalism, litter, rudeness, haste, jaywalking, poverty, and indecorousness in any form. It's like the idea of the middle ages we might get from an open-air museum staffed by people with good teeth in freshly-laundered costumes who don't have plague and aren't drunkenly trying to murder each other or dying in childbirth. Its little two-car monorail adds to the theme-park feeling: It's efficient and useful, but oddly toy-like for a mass transit system.
Safety warnings are illustrated with cartoons. Sliding doors have stickers of bawling cartoon people who are squirting huge tears off at every angle because they got a hand caught. The monorail uses a cartoon crab with a bandaged claw. The cartoon characters warn you without straining the social harmony between you and them. Instead of "there's danger here, watch it", they say, "well, everything is fine. It's just, look at what happened to Clippy the Crab, here. You don't want to end up like Clippy, that's all. Ha! Look at his bandaged little claw! Have a great day."
The civility of the Japanese is wonderful, but Japanese etiquette always seems to require a huge amount of effort. This is a country where labour is expensive and automation relentlessly pursued. A block from my hotel, you can buy a haircut from a vending machine. (In fact, you can buy a ticket that entitles you to a haircut from a barber, though engineers somewhere are working 16 hour days to build a machine with a coin slot and a hole that says "insert head here".) But the main part of the job of almost anyone in public view seems to be to act out polite rituals.
Maintaining this system of etiquette is like pyramid- or cathedral-building -- an effort that drains off huge resources and seems mysterious to outsiders. "Japanese saleswoman" is a candidate for the most grueling job in the world. Deep-sea fishermen and coal miners would be broken in a week if they had to make themselves up like anime princesses and spend every day on their feet, bowing, smiling wide-eyed smiles, and endlessly repeating the same set of formulas and gestures.
One of the awkward things about travel in Japan is not having responses to these sorts of things. Someone from the hotel staff got off the elevator at a different floor; she turned back, beamed a thousand-watt smile, and bowed until the doors closed again. Smiling and nodding always feels inadequate, and bowing back doesn't feel like an option, so you rifle through the gestures you know for a possible response. The sheepish wave? The finger gun? The embarrassed grin? The thumbs-up? The wai? The salute? The Vulcan salute? The fishing reel? The disco point? The fist pump? The horns? The ASL signs for "elevator doors take a long time to close in your country"?
Outdoor vending machines are everywhere in Naha, as in Tokyo. No one with 120 yen in his pocket is ever more than a minute away from a can of cold Boss-brand coffee ("Boss is the Boss of them all since 1992"). The reason for this is that it's considered perfectly safe and reasonable to leave vending machines sitting around in alleys and parking lots. In principle, someone could vandalize or rob them, but this is Japan: Why would someone do that? Outdoor vending machines are less a Japanese quirk than something higher crime rates deprive us of in other countries.
I went to Shuri castle, capital of the old Ryukyu kingdom, two beautiful complexes of wooden buildings surrounded by parkland and a sloping wall of dark gray stone. Like everything else, it was destroyed in the war. In fact, it formed part of the Japanese defenses, and there's a moderately famous raising-the-flag photo from its capture by the Americans. It was rebuilt entirely in the 1990s. You can pad through the buildings, carrying your shoes in a little plastic bag.
Kokusai-dori, the 'international street', is a strip of tourist stores and restaurants, from which disorienting tangles of shopping arcades wind back into the city. Japan is the only country in the world in which tourist shops are not boring. The big stores compete on unexpectedness. They display bright grids of boxes that might hold literally anything that can be manufactured cheaply and stuffed into a small box. You want to bring them back as gifts just to find out what they are. There are more U.S. military types here than elsewhere; beefy American men in their early 20s, in groups of four, carefully well-behaved.
I didn't do as much in Naha as would have liked. Fighting off the Filipino cold virus ran me down. "Fighting off" might not be quite right; it was more of an abject surrender followed by the virus getting bored and finally leaving. The sort of state in which you put on a sock and try not to think about the other sock you have to put on, because that's the kind of long-term strategic planning you don't have the energy to undertake.
I left Naha and flew up to Seoul.
