Dostoievski On The Shore

With cheeks red of shame, I see that the last entry of my blog is somewhere in February while we now entered April. And one way or another I have to try to bridge the gap, not only to update for those faithful readers, but also for myself to recall my experiences, feelings and thoughts of the last month, which I want to share with you, and not just give a brief account of all the places I have visited. Like many others, I decided that I wanted to flea the cold, and go to the more subtropical Okinawa. Okinawa, advertised as being paradise on Japanese soil, with wonderful weather, great beaches and laid back people. But Okinawa also has a history, which many of the people still carry with them and also is clearly to be seen on the island. I’m talking about the American Occupation. After World War II whole Japan was occupied for almost 7 years, until 1952, but Okinawa stayed under American Occupation until 1974 and a lot of the land is still occupied by military bases.
We stayed in Naha, the major city, which is just like all cities in Japan, a tumbling of buildings in ugly greyish colours. While the main street was bustling with tourism, it became very evident the majority of the people were pretty poor, judging by the houses they were living in. Next to tourism, many are reliant on the American soldiers for their income. Many Okinawans on the one hand want to get rid of the American soldiers because there happened some accidents and also the bases occupy a lot of land and destroy the beaches and natural landscape, and on the other hand they don’t want them to go because then they loose their main source of income.
Looking for paradise beaches, we went to the first beach we saw on the map, and we ended up at a beach of which I still do not know whether it was natural or not, but in the see the Japanese had made a huge fly-over, destroying whatever possible beautiful view we might have had. The weather was still nice but the view was bad, so it was a great moment to indulge me in the book I was carrying for a week around Okinawa, ‘The Idiot’ by Dolstoivski.
This being the first day of our trip to Okinawa, we were sure to find more beaches, and hopefully the one’s with a coral blue sea and sandy beaches. And two days later we decided to give it another try and we took the bus in the direction we were told, and we got out at a place where the beach seemed nice to us. It was a wonderful sight as long as you looked in front of you, to the sea and the beach and not back to the hotel to which the beach seemed to belong. And almost the minute we had changed clothes and laid or self down for a laid back time at the beach, some Japanese youngster came and asked us if we were willing to join them in a game of beach volley. And of course in our sunny mood but not total confident about or once at high school acquired volleyball skills we would pass the test. But or challengers turned out to be as skilled as we, so there was more diving for the ball than anyone being able to return it.
So long Dolstoievski! Although fairly sunburned, tired and with sand in our shoes, this was still not exactly what we came for to Okinawa. We were looking for beaches with on the background nature and as less tourist as possible. Our last resort was a little island in the sea, with only 300 inhabitants. We went there by ferry, and almost the first thing we were confronted with, when we arrived were broken down cars without any number plates, perhaps in some ancient past used to cross over the island, which seemed rather strange to us, because the island was tiny. The beaches were almost deserted, loaded with all kinds of subtropical shells which we of course started gathering. The island inhabitants were mostly elderly people, still tiling their own vegetables. It seemed to me a nice way to spend the time after one’s retirement, although, I could not exact imagine me tiling my vegetables, but I could imagine me reading nice books.
But not before long the sky turned grey, and the rain started pouring out as if to make sure that every living creature would be soaking wet. We did not have a single dry thread on our clothes, and hurried our way back to the ferry to get back to the mainland to have a shower and nice dry clothes. I finally read ‘The Idiot’ not on the shore, but on the 20 hour trip by Ferry which brought us back from Okinawa to Kagoshima. And what has an Idiot got to say about it: Even in paradise it can rain.