Japanese Travels

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Okinawa Travel Reflections

okinawa beach
















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I have been to Japan about 10 times over the years. My first visit was in 1979 when I spent the night at Narita before going to Korea the next day.  I last visited in April of this year doing a tour of Fukuoka and Kyushu.  I spent five weeks doing a TDY in Sapporo and spent a week in Okinawa before the covid shutdowns. I also visited Tokyo a couple of times ,traveled to Kamakura and Kyoto and Nara. I even climbed Mt. Fuji.

When I was an undergraduate, I took courses in Japanese history and while in graduate school took courses in Japanese history, and business as part of my MA in Korean studies.

I also taught Asian studies at the University of Maryland in 1991 in Korea. I even picked up a few words of basic Japanese during my travels.

If you know Korean, you can learn Japanese pretty easily and vice versa. the grammar of the two languages are very similar and many vocabulary words are derived from Chinese characters.  I can read about 500 characters.

Many expats who have been in both Korea and Japan prefer one or the other. I definitely prefer Korea but i like Japan and plan on future trips there.

Here then are some of my reflections on traveling in Japan.

Kyushu

I just came back from a trip to Kyushu Japan, a mostly rural part of Japan that I had never visited.  I have been to Japan about eight times since 1979. I always contrast Japan with Korea where I now live part-time and with the U.S.. we are planning to come back next spring and spend a month in Japan -two weeks in Kyushu, one week in Tokyo, a few days in Kyoto/Nara and Hokkaido but might take another mini-tour hitting other parts of Japan. There is a good tour of Osaka/Kyoto and Nara we can do in September.

Overall the tour was a b  - good choices of things to do, good food, got to know a few of our fellow participants and my Korean is getting quite good enough that I can continue a conversation and have people mostly understand me and I understand most of what people say to me.




Tuesday, April 17, 2024

Our first night we stayed in the Hilton in Fukuoka.  I was a bit disappointed with the hotel.  Just not up to what I might expect from a Hilton chain hotel. the breakfast was substandard. The TV did not work â?" everything was defaulting to Japanese and we could not figure it out.

Wednesday, April 18, 2024

Our second night was better.

Had a great breakfast Japanese style 5 stars one of the best I had so much better than the Hilton

Including the plates which had several places to place your food good choice of coffee and tea but no decafe

Looking forward to today ending with a sauna

Beepo Hot Springs - privage suana facilities

one of the highlights of the trip.  The hotspring hotel had private sauna facilities for several people. It was very nice.

Morning Visit to Suspension Bridge,  Mt. Kumho Observatory
Tawara marshes

The staff were very helpful spoke English and were friendly. Recommend staying in Beppu for a future trip.   Saw the volcanic eruptions from a safe distance.  The marsh lands are interesting.

Lunch

Better than yesterday. Spoke with a nice older couple and practiced my Korean which keeps getting better

Mari Grasslands, Volcano Views




Stopped off to see the Mari grassland and the reclining Buddha mountain in the background, saw cows and skydivers, and got good pictures. Felt better after getting my coffee out fix

Stopped off at an ice cream shop and a rose garden.

Hotel in Aso city

We stayed at a hotel/ryokan. The rooms and overall ambiance was quite backward. On the plus side, it was filled with museum-quality art.  The outdoor bathing area was a joke!  Little more than a hot tub but without a jacuzzi and no place to wash up, no place to even store you clothes.   Very substandard.  We did not use it.  Quite a contrast to the world-class facilities at the hotel in  Beppu which we had stayed in the night before.  That hotel featured private sauna rooms.  Very relaxing.

They gave us a nice dinner spread including for some reason horse sashimi!

Earthquake

We were woken up by an alert on my phone and an earthquake that shook everything up. Felt as far away as  Busan in Korea.

Here's the info as of this morning

A magnitude 6.6 earthquake, measuring a weak 6 on Japan's seismic intensity scale, struck off the west coast of shikoku island on wednesday night.

There was no threat of a tsunami from the quake, which struck at 11:14 p.m., and initial reports suggested only minor injuries and damage.

The quake measured a weak 6 â?" the third highest level â?" in the Ehime prefecture town of Aina and the Kochi prefecture city of Sukuma. Striking at a depth of 39 kilometers, its epicenter was in the bungo channel, a straight separating the islands of Kyushu and shikoku.

Chief cabinet secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi, speaking at a news conference shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday, said several light injuries had been reported. Nhl reported minor damage in some areas, including broken water pipes, fallen streetlights, and a landslide on a national roadway.

Thursday, April 19
Final  day

Today will do a Fukuoka city tour, looking forward to it and returning home. We stayed in an old-fashioned ryokan but they had a nice dinner spread and great artwork â?" took lots of pictures while I was in the lobby waiting for the all-clear.

Aso City is a very provincial town, rural Japan at its best and worst.

Another shocking thing is the lack of translation software.  It seems to me that would be widely used particularly in the tourist industry, but you would be wrong.  In some ways, Japan is very backward and insular looking.  It is run by old men who are out of touch with how the world is changing.

And they are just emerging from the decades of deflation, the lost years as they put it,  where everyone including the US which also has its backwardness jumped forward while Japan slept.

Tokyo v Seoul

Tokyo, like seoul, is a sprawling city, hard to get a real feel for it. Seoul is in some ways a prettier city with the mountains and the river but Tokyo has its charms too.

I stayed there several times.  My favorite neighborhood is Roppongi which is near the us embassy and is close to an old us army base. The neighborhood started out as an army vile, when the us pulled out of central Tokyo, the neighborhood became Tokyo's international quarter.  A similar phenomenon is occurring in seoul as Itaewon moves from being an army vil to an international district after the us army pulled out of central seoul

Getting around is pretty easy.  The subway is a bit confusing but one gets used to it.

Hokkaido Sapporo

I spent five weeks there in 2003 doing a TDY.  It was a great trip and I enjoyed the city.  Everything is connected via tunnels underground next to the excellent subway system so one does not have to get exposed to the cold that much. It snows there from September to May. I was there in late March and it snowed every day.  I found an expat bar in town and hung out there and got to know some locals.  I also found a sake place near my hotel and tried different sake every night.  The hotel had a choice of Japanese or American breakfast â?"I chose the Japanese option and enjoyed Japanese breakfast every day for five weeks.

Kamakura

I went there by train for a day trip from Tokyo and had a great time touring the impressive temple complex.

Kyoto-Nara

Went there with my friend and enjoyed it.  We stopped off at a Shinto shrine which features a giant penis statue.  It is a fertility temple.  There is another one nearby that features giant vaginas.

Mt fuji

I climbed it.  In august.  It was snowing at the top. But i can say i made it.

Okinawa

Here are the poems i wrote from my trip to Okinawa along with some photos





























































Okinawa poems:
Okinawa war thoughts
Okinawa beckons me
Ghosts of Okinawa
Asian linguistic confusion
Okinawa aquarium thoughts
Okinawa West Coast Highway




Okinawa war thoughts




these dark moods
follow me
Asi tour Okinawa

where the last battles
of World War 11

were fought

thousands died
in the first
and last outpost
of the American

East Asian empire

Okinawa beckons me

Okinawa Japan
kept calling to me
in a dream

Notifying me
always in the background
where my memories
always waiting for me

beckons me
everywhere i go
cosmic reflections
of past lives

Never seen before
seems lost in time

Maybe just the spirits

Of the dead
everywhere

I see ghosts

Okinawa street scene

walking the streets
of fabled Naha Okinawa
a lifetime dream
someday I would visit

i am surrounded
by ghosts of the past

and Japanese beauties
all around me

tempting me
with their sweet smiles

No wonder
so many soldiers
brought back
Japanese wives

ghosts of Okinawa

ghosts of Okinawa

touring the battlefields
of Okinawa

where so many young men
gave up their life
so many years ago

i see the ghosts
all around me
feel their spirits
floating through the air

Kilroy was here
there and everywhere
whoever that was

John Dean wannabes
Elvis wannabes

and so many other wannabes
I  see the ghosts

of the fallen heroes
all around me

Asian Street Signs

Everywhere in Asia
you see strange variations
of English
Japlish,Konglish,Singlish

the street signs in Okinawa
are all in Chinese, Japanese,

English and Koreans
the bus and train

announcements as well

hard to get lost
even when you want to

but the random encounters
with English words
puts a smile on my face

as i drink my "boss coffee"
wondering who the "boss" is
and why is smoking a pipe?

And many years ago
i saw on a menu
at the old Gimpo airport
baked Rick

and in Korean

grocery stores
one can find
corn flights

i look forward
to many more years
of linguistic confusion
as I travel about Asia

Visit to Okinawa aquarium

whenever I visit an aquarium,
zoo or Wildlife park

I am reminded of a prison
the prison is filled with animals
who amuse us.

I am sure that the animals
hate us  humans
who are watching them
do their animal thing

but looking into their eyes
the eyes of the sea turtles
swimming back and forth

in their prison cell
in the Okinawa aquarium
filled with hatred
for the humans

who had imprisoned them
and hunt their kind

and don't get me started
on the dolphins and killer whales
who preform acrobatic feats
for their daily meals

and the sharks
the king of the ocean killers

they too
if they could
they surely would

escape
their prison cell

screaming
death to all humans
as they flee
back into the ocean's depths

Okinawa West Coast road

Riding down

the West Coast road
of Okinawa
echoes of other beach roads
fill my head with memories

i am reminded of Hawaii
and driving along the Oregon coast
East Coast beach towns as well

and Barbados
and the Caribbean islands

all the roads
are lined with tourist resorts
beach views and restaurants

all very similar
yet different

and as the beach towns
fade away
behind us on the bus

my memories
of all the other beach towns
i have visited

fade away
into my memory hole.