Why’d You Come To Japan?#

Everyone in Japan seems to want to understand why we came. Other visitors want to know, but Japanese people especially want to know. “Do you like anime?” is always their first guess. I think what they’re really trying to ask is: are you a weeb?

Our answer always leaves them unconvinced: it’s just really pleasant here.

But it’s the truth! Japan is easily the most pleasant place to travel I’ve ever been.

• Impeccable infrastructure, with bountiful trains and metros running punctually.⁰¹
• Safe in a way most of us probably didn’t imagine was possible: you can walk around any part of any city at any time (e.g., alone as a woman at midnight).
• Food that shocks in its impossible pareto-optimally of consistency and price: you can get a filling, expertly prepared bowl of pork, eggs, and rice in a sit-down restaurant in Tokyo for $4.70 at lunch.⁰²
• A culture that treats visitors with such respect that you can watch, in real-time, any old bumbling Joe Blow from the West become gentle and thankful and clumsily imitate the countless micro-bows he is receiving.
• Plus, as we’d find out this trip, Japan’s nature is almost frustratingly beautiful and varied and well-preserved.

So why did you come to Japan? I tried many versions of elaborating on the above at various lengths, but it never seemed to quite make it across the language barrier. They would politely half-nod, either confused or processing. (“Probably just a weeb.”) The immense language and “foreigner” barrier is perhaps the largest remaining twist of visiting Japan.⁰³ Sometimes a blessing, usually a tiny curse.

We stayed for three months. Long enough the immigration people wanted to see our tickets out.⁰⁴ First stop: Okinawa.

Japan Japan Japan#

Record scratch — sorry, we need to pop out of the forth wall even further for one paragraph.

Brewing for months (now years) in my mind: how and whether to broach the meme of White Guy Visits Japan; Has a Good Time. Japan’s meteoric rise in tourism continues, the West’s fascination⁰⁵ with it hums along at a fever pitch, and half the recent vacations you get told about were to sample the Tokyo / Kyoto / Osaka trifecta. Say one imbues their writing with the hyper self-consciousness of its participation in an exceedingly over-experienced and over-described activity. Does this improve the writing?

I don’t know. But consider topic at least minimally broached.

Getting Our Bearings#

Okinawa is, by increasing taxonomic specificity:

• a prefecture (I just mentally substitute “state”),
  • a group of islands, and
    • a specific island.

One thing I’ve learned about myself is the only thing I will reliably do before traveling somewhere is obsess over its geographic taxonomy. (Original source.)

We mostly stayed on the island of Okinawa, with a brief day trip by ferry to a tiny nearby island to practice nearly drowning. More on that later.

In this leg, we were joined by our friend Marcus.

Cruising#

We rented a car.

You might be wondering: why get a car? Isn’t Japan like the world’s bastion of trains?

It turns out, the universal exception to public transportation is island life. We tried Oahu without a car and ended up getting one halfway through,⁰⁶ we tried Jeju without a car and wished we had one. We learned our lesson the third time, so before hitting up Okinawa we paid AAA for their mandatory scam International Driving Permit.⁰⁷

Ocean cruising.

It was extremely worth it. We drove all over the island.

(How did we get a car? Oh, dear reader, I hoped you’d ask. Read PostScript: The Last Car in Okinawa near the end of this post for the saga.)

Naha, The City#

We stayed in Naha, capital city of Okinawa. Sprawling with local bars, brimming with domestic tourists (probably), and regional beer Orion free-flowing from every spigot.

More broadly, Naha is a bit of an odd place. There’s a big USA military base with a troubled past. It’s no exception to the above rule of island life: you still need a car. There’s one monorail we almost took but which is fundamentally not that useful.

This was my first (re-?)encounter with a format of bar that we’d discover to be totally ubiquitous in Japan: narrow, eight-story buildings with multiple bars on every floor.

We tried going on some weeknights. Stopped by several in a building. All open, all with staff waiting inside, and all completely, utterly devoid of any customers.

OK but these bar names are actually fire

For me this was amazing. Have some beer, and play pool or throw darts in peace. (OK, maybe I would have preferred like two other patrons just to not feel weird.⁰⁸)

We had mixed weather, which in a way was cool because we got to see (and thankfully, usually not walk around in) some serious tropical rainstorms.

There Is No Castle at Shuri Castle#

One of the few Officially Mandated Tourist Activities (OMTA) in Naha is a castle called Shuri Castle. We paid a visit early on.

After parking in a magical automated parking lot that physically traps your car there if you haven’t properly paid for your time, we trudged up the hill and paid the entrance fee to see the castle.

Along the way, you’ll learn fun facts like that karate apparently was invented in Okinawa.

Once inside, it took a few minutes for us to understand that the castle for which we had just paid admission to visit did not exist.

This: just the current iteration of scaffolding.

I cannot make this up. Japan seems to have a general fascination with building castles entirely out of wood in a painstaking and artisanal process, having the castle burn down, and then building it again. Old castles in Kyoto have burned down like seven times or something. This one had burned down four times, was recently rebuilt in 2019, lasted for nine months, and then burned down again.

Now, guess what they’re planning to do? Yep, you got it, they’re going to build it again.

We spent an hour strolling the cloudy hilltop castle grounds that were our admission-granted privilege to roam. Throughout were infographics and plaques and films describing previous castles and their construction process. I searched the faces of all the staff we passed for the slightest hint of apology or humor or sheepishness, of some awareness that the whole thing feels kind of like a prank. (I found none, the practiced mask of professionalism practically a national treasure.)

The overcast sprawl, and several infographics detailing the past, present, and future smoldering castle ruins.

With increasing desperation, I searched and searched for the slightest hint of a plan to, you know, prevent the castle from burning down again. Some whisper of flame retardants or sprinkler systems or wood treatments or alternative materials or anything.

None. By all appearances, the plan was to build it yet again, painstakingly and with tradition, out of wood.⁰⁹

Okinawa’s Nature#

I found Okinawa truly shined where all islands ought to: beaches, cliffs, forests. Warm island drives fueled by upbeat music and greasy fast food.

Gigantic A&Ws remain, as many Western relics do here, inexplicably preserved and precise, still popular among locals.

Japan is still, in so many ways, culturally isolated, its own fever dream of itself, living inside a thick and mysterious filter that lets through and explodes and then preserves for decades one in a thousand bands, fashion fads, food trends, and spawns of technology. Who knows what will become big in Japan?

Friendship Island Nearly Claims Us#

One day we took a boat ride to the teensy Zamami Island, west of Okinawa. Small port town, covered in forests and beaches, a few roads spider out along it. Bought cold liquids and hiked down the paved switchbacks to the beach. Beautiful, idyllic.

Exploring, we trudged across a narrow sandbar to an even teensier island (no inhabitants). Not knowing this teensier island’s name, we as dutiful explorers dub it “Friendship Island” (turns out it’s “Amuro Island”) and admire the shells and rocks with imprints in them. As we crossed the sandbar back in ankle-deep water, a man in a boat sped by, and yelled at us “strong current!” Strange, I thought. It wasn’t that strong. Plus what specific English words to know. Didn’t think much of it. Strange things happen constantly while traveling.

A short beach-lounge period later, we realize we had left our cheaply acquired badminton set on Friendship Island. Marcus and I head back to get it.

The current is now, indeed, strong. As we cross, the water goes from knee-depth—difficult but manageable to ford—to chest-depth. Chest-depth fast water, I learn, is impossible to battle. Admitting that we may not make it to our lost badminton set was the first step of admitting there was actual danger.

So, halfway through, we start wading back. Our feet are sinking in the sand, so we are carrying our shoes. Trying to make it back hopping without fully swimming (try swimming holding shoes). It is slow going, and the current seems to be increasing, trying to push us off the sandbar. Eventually Marcus tells me, “mate, I need to abandon my shoes. I can’t make it with them.” The sadness of already besmirching this pristine landscape, first with our plastic toy trash, and now with a pair of shoes, is surmounted by the raw need for survival. He lets them go and begins strugging more properly towards the shore. I am carrying my thick and non-absorbing Birkenstocks, which I decide to keep attempting to save.

Barely making any headway, fully aware of the danger of the situation, the plot thickens. There’s an (English-speaking) woman in the water near us, and she begins yelling “Help!”

An (English-speaking) man on the shore, panicked, starts yelling at us. “Help her! Can you help her?”

Such begins, now, the awful calculus one must do in such situations. Was I in danger? Yes. Did I feel like I was at risk of dying? Mildly, but not strongly. Is someone is yelling “help” in the water at risk of dying? Definitely yes. Might I actually also die if I try to help them? Yes.

So, agonizingly, we yell back, we can’t help! We can barely make it too! He sets off running to the populated beach zone, which is around a bend and not in view.

Thankfully, many events then unfolded in quick succession:

• I got close enough to the shore (Marcus was still far behind) I could throw my Birks back onto it
• I swam out to the woman and put an arm around her
• We successfully swam back to shore together

We made sure Marcus made it and then walked back towards the main beach zone. She was shaken, but mostly embarrassed. (“I really am a strong swimmer!”) After a few steps, the man peels around a corner, followed by a Japanese guy with a big floatation device. Relief and probably exhaustion keels him over, and the Japanese guy catches his breath and turns around with an eye roll.

I think she would have made it without me—she was more panicked at a loss of control than truly drowning. But even still, I feel guilt thinking about the whole thing. I’m glad I didn’t lose my Birks (Marcus trudged around for days in horrid undersized flip flops he bought at the beach store), but should I have immediately cast them away and swam to her aid? Was “try to save shoes” vs “save life” actually what I was weighing? Only writing this out now do I realize that “able to save shoes” correlated with “not in danger myself,” so I think it was probably the right call by coincidence.

Anyway we had one hell of a story for Julie when we got back around the bend.

Snakes in a Can#

Japan has developed a cheery matter-of-fact infrastructure around OMTAs. For example, there are camera stands—thoughtfully designed to admit both real and phone cameras, weather-proof, icon-labeled—so that you can take a nice group photo at the entrance of an activity, complete with corny sign identifying your location, without shamefully bothering another human being to help you. We saw these used liberally.

Normally I avoid caves filled with colored lights—a classic trick caves globally have learned to make their photos look bombastic and attract moth-brained tourists.¹⁰ But the caves were included with admission to the mega OMTA park we visited, so we took a stroll through. And damn, I have to say, some caves are cool. These were enormous!

Of course, now, examining these photos, they look just like every Google Maps photo of every cave filled with gaming lights, so I will just urge you to trust me that the labyrinth was large and impressive.

A big theme of this OMTA zone was the Okinawa Habu, which is a pit viper that lives in Okinawa. They are aquatic and the exhibit included tanks of them swimming around, and plaques with stories of people being bitten by them and having a bad time, along with lightly-translated advice about what to do.

If you could unmute you’d hear me saying something like, I guess they probably don’t mind about the paint.

The whole tone re: snakes was confusing. It kind of had a nature conservation vibe about it, sort of like, “let’s learn about these snakes but also keep our safe distance.” But then, the gift shop, sold all sorts of products ostensibly made out of these snakes, like canned beverages (!?) with suggested recipes. It felt like if you visited, I don’t know, a pig sanctuary, and then the gift shop sold bacon.

Yes, you are reading that right, these are snake-themed—possibly even snake-containing—canned riffs on the highball (practically the national cocktail) and lemon sour.

Then, for some reason, there were also other animals there too? I wasn’t sure if there was a strong theme or just like, hey, might as well get some more stuff to put in cages for you to look at. There were fuzzy bats and tortoises and turtles who seemed to really want to pile on top of each other. The cages all felt a bit small, but then I realized, wait, everything I just described is literally all zoos. Man, I don’t know. Zoos still always weird me out.

Intermission for Some Japanese Products#

Let’s dip our toe in, shall we.

Yes, these are pieces of sushi individually wrapped in plastic. Japan 1, Earth 0.

Top: Left: The thing I find interesting about this is that it’s like taco has gone through two successive mistranslations, first through white people taco night, and then through Japanification. Bottom: Right: Sports water here just hits different.

Mangroves#

You can kayak amongst these partially submerged trees. But, you really gotta make reservations early, especially with a significant drive time to get across the island. I called several places and did my damndest in broken Japanese, but there were no openings left.

This, always, the tension with travel. How much to plan? I think the sweet spot is some kind of “supported spontaneity,” scaffolded by reservations you do need in advance to not miss opportunities entirely.

We went anyway, and had a nice nature walk, saw some bugs.

The Aquarium#

I’m normally not crazy about aquariums. But man, this one was amazing. So many strange creatures! Like if you really look, aquatic wildlife is beautiful and awesome in the literal sense (inspiring awe), and strange in a pure sense—in how foreign the shapes and colors and behaviors are compared to us land mammals.

Bottom: Barbershark quintet.

Addendum: Odds and Ends of Interest#

TOUGH GUMMY is my favorite candy. I first tried it on a previous trip to Japan, picked fully randomly from a convenience store to have something so snack on as I waited for the first leg of an unexpected journey from Nagoya to Tokyo after my plane failed to land in Narita and dumped us a city over. Great flavor, incredible chewiness. And so hard to find outside of Japan! I tried every specialty store I could find internationally, even in truly Japanophile places like Taiwan. Nothing. Then, arriving and finding them in absolutely every Lawson (convenience store) here: incredible. 2025 update: a store in NYC also has them!

Yep

What

Sorry, I know a urinal is a gross thing to photograph, but WHY IS THERE A MAN WITH A COLLAR, APRON, AND TIE APPEARING AND SAYING A LONG THING?

This machine from the future blends you a smoothie, live, in real time, on demand. Yes.

Mildly horrifying or just me

This was a fascinating bathroom, so I’ve got several pictures. First off: for me, all of these activities as so specific I have never before seen them depicted in icon form. And the left two left me quite confused. What do you think is going on?

This detailed diagram of the full restroom layout and all equipment available and labeled icons for where you can do what should serve as a general indicator for the level of organization that is just absolutely freaking everywhere.

OK so my best guess for the icon of the guy with one foot on the stool thing (lower left square of the four, two photos ago; labeled ‘Floor of Extra Clothes’ in previous photo) is that it’s to stand on in your socks to change your clothes if/when you, I don’t know, soil yourself midday. Why do you need to stand on a thing? I mean typically bathroom floors are gross, and I guess everybody perceives their own bathroom floors to be gross, which, fair enough. But yeah the bathrooms were extremely clean.

Summing Up Okinawa#

So, how was Okinawa?

Japan, to my outsider’s eye, is a simultaneous merge of super wacky and super un-wacky. Okinawa lacked the un-wackiness, which left it oops-all-wacky. Not so much your typical Japan way, but in its own island flavor that was somehow even more charming:

• There’s a castle that’s not there
• There’s a snake museum that also sells snake cocktails in a can
• Bountiful amazingly themed bars, fully operating, totally empty
• A gold limo for no reason (see next section)
• An A&W somehow full of Japanese people (and not tourists)
• An indie film festival showing the most godawful homegrown movies (Marcus would comment after, Maybe they should have Googled “how to make a movie.”)
• As with other islands, it felt trapped decades in the past, both history and time itself running more slowly
• A weird (that it exists) military base nearby
• The “going out” district seemed to be comprised strictly of questionable bars filled with women targeting Japanese businessmen (not, say, balanced with other things to eat / drink / do)

Compared to the rest of Japan, the infrastructure was more limited. This does make it harder to be a tourist:

• Not many ferries
• Not many general reservations open (for activities)
• Hard to get a rental car
• Less English

But I think that’s all part of the charm. It was a great escape from Japan’s increasing Westernmania. There were amazing beaches, some of which we had totally to ourselves. And it let us cosplay suburban life a bit with driving to grocery stores.

I would go back.

PostScript: The Last Car in Okinawa#

Look, I didn’t even book it that last-minute.¹¹

I tried everyone. Companies I recognized (Hertz, Avis, Budget), ones I didn’t (Fuji, ABC, Orix, Sixt), manufacturers’ own rentals like Toyota (this is a thing), and a many local ones (j-netrentacar, Nippon rent-a-car, timescar, etc.).

Filling out all these local rental request forms in Japanese was part role-playing a pre-globalization immigrant, part being forced into a time machine.

For the cross-culture part: the forms absolutely required your name be written in Japanese in two ways: (1) phonetically, (2) using Chinese characters. Requirement (1) was no problem, because I’d been banging my head against elementary Japanese for almost a year at that point. I could barely order food, but damn it if I couldn’t write¹² MA-KU-SU (Max) in each of their multiple phonetic alphabets. But (2) was a serious problem. Do I just make something up? Is the Chinese character of my name obligated to have some phonetic or literal connection to what I wrote in (1)?

But the time machine part was due to exquisitely frustrating web design choices. Japan, famously technologically antiquated,¹³ seems to have settled on a method for web design where the text on a webpage is embedded into images instead of being written down. This was surprisingly ubiquitous in my months visiting random websites for, e.g., bike rentals. Even Nintendo does it: check out this page in their archive.

Every single piece of text on this page is an image. Each text is a screenshot of that text. If you work on websites, this will be so incomprehensible you will probably go through the stages of grief before accepting it. It is an absolute accessibility nightmare and a truly baffling way to make websites. And it’s everywhere in Japanese websites.

The consequence of making your webpage display all the text in images is that web browsers can’t translate it. So you end up in this hilarious situation where you’re pointing your phone at your computer screen, phone running Google Translate’s space-age translation technology¹⁴ just to get backwards from the image to normal text so you can figure out this field says “Date of birth.”

Here’s the list of all the car rental places we checked:

This is the kind of multi-hour drudgery travel influencers gloss over.

By the end of it, the only cars we could find were were novelty luxury car rentals you’d use for a stunt to, e.g., impress someone who is impressed by novelty luxury cars. They started at 3x the usual rental price we’d get in Japan, and went up from there.

We picked the cheapest one. This happened to be the largest car on the whole island, a Mazda SUV. I drove this around all the tiny alleys and miniscule one-way roads, constantly terrified of even a single scratch.¹⁵

The second most entertaining part of the rental experience is to scare you from driving on the beach, they show you a photo of a convertible submerged in sand and seawater, and then its ruinous remains after being hauled out.¹⁶ Worked on me.

The most entertaining part, the silver lining of the whole rental fiasco? Complimentary pickup and drop-off service in a gold limo, driven by the delightfully grumpiest teenage boys in the entire nation. Dust covered the champagne glasses, the phone didn’t work, but it didn’t matter, it was awesome.

Footnotes

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1. The exception that soundly proves the rule: see one Japanese train company issuing an apology after one of its trains departed twenty seconds early. ↩︎

2. It’s probably even cheaper now with the wild exchange rate. Did I mention a self-service machine dispenses unlimited refills of rice? ↩︎

3. A new one has also emerged: over-tourism. ↩︎

4. This struck me as strange. If one’s plan was to secretly stay forever, wouldn’t one just state a very inconspicuous intended trip duration? Maybe one uses “90 days” to get the longest possible lead on evading the authorities? ↩︎

5. The line between fascination and fetishization also blurry and fraught. ↩︎

6. This is a story for another day. The company had you pick up 2006 Nissans from random parking lots and was run by an old guy named Bubba. ↩︎

7. I won’t go into details here. It’s a total scam, but it’s been successfully institutionalized, so you just roll with it. ↩︎

8. Yes, chatting with locals is great and really important and easily becomes the most memorable and defining experience of a trip. But also, being two or three, not speaking the language, and with locals not always immensely keen on speaking yours—plus sometimes they’re trying to hang out with their friends, or relax after a long workday—and having experienced the stilted, sheered image of the same opening conversation so many times, it isn’t what I aim for every day. I envy extroverts who seek such experiences relentlessly. But this travel was a marathon, not a sprint. So sometimes, I’d just play darts. ↩︎

9. I find it helpful, at times like these, to reflect again upon experiences I’ve heard Americans describe of moving to Japan and trying to slot into some kind of creaking hierarchy, finding such hierarchy full of processes and bureaucracy and (perceived) inefficiencies, and being utterly unable to enact or even communicate the idea of changing a process, the whole very thing seeming to be carved in stone. ↩︎

10. I pass no judgment, I am extremely moth-brained myself. Example of things my 90s/00s moth brain has been programmed to love: underglow (lights under cars), bars with colorful lights, lights inside computers and “gaming” lights, under-cabinet lighting, neon signs, etc etc etc. ↩︎

11. Editor’s note: I went back and checked, and despite booking several cities beforehand, in terms of absolute time, I will admit this was my bad. ↩︎

12. Well, actually spell. Never learned the writing by hand. It’s a humbling experience to go from classification (reading) to generation (writing) and realize you can’t draw the shapes, or even really produce them out of air from memory. ↩︎

13. This fact confounds anyone who has a vague idea of Japan but hasn’t visited, because it seems like it should be this futuristic techno society, but instead it’s all digital cameras and fax machines. (This is less true now than it was in, say, 2013, but it’s still true.) ↩︎

14. It does OCR—optical character recognition—to find text in the live image feed, then runs the text through a machine translation system, then outputs ridiculous stuff like “HOT SAND SET” and you’re like, do I order this for breakfast? ↩︎

15. Their pre-drive inspection was meticulous, and the agreement included some scary clauses about paying them for the time a car would be in the shop and unrentable, which I guess wouldn’t be covered by insurance? Also trying to actually use the insurance that comes with my credit card last year even just for a flat tire taught me this is a nightmare to be avoided. ↩︎

16. Your brain makes up a story to fill in the blanks: military dude, splurging to impress his visiting babe, further riled up maybe by one or four Orions, rolls out onto the beach for a romantic and/or thrilling ride, the stages of grief as the car gets stuck, the terror and stages of grief over the upcoming debt the next day, etc. ↩︎