🇯🇵 Japan

TODO: include map(s) here of Naha

Why’d You Come To Japan?#

Everyone seems to want to understand this. 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. Sometimes a blessing, usually a tiny curse.

We stayed for three months. Long enough the immigration people wanted to see our tickets out.⁰³

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 fascination⁰⁴ 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 minimally broached.

The Last Car in Okinawa#

Look, I didn’t even book it that last-minute.⁰⁵

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 write 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,⁰⁶ 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.

TODO: embed Nintendo image maybe

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 technology⁰⁷ 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:

TODO: embed list of places we tried

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.⁰⁸

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 gold convertible submerged in sand and seawater, and then its ruinous remains after being hauled out. 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.

Oh, by the way, you might be wondering: why did we 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,⁰⁹ 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. It was extremely worth it. We drove all over the island.

Getting Our Bearings#

Okinawa is, by increasing taxonomic specificity:

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

Here’s an annotation I made:

TODO: annotate https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Location_map_Ryukyu_Islands.png

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.

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.

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.

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 was most recently rebuilt in TODO, lasted for TODO 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.)

Even more desperately, I searched and searched for the slightest hint of a plan to 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.¹⁰

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.

TODO: photos: cliffs, glamping, island drives TODO: photos: A&W

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#

• boat ride to XXX island (beautiful)
• hike down
• little sand path to an island to explore w/ animal imprints in the rocks
• promptly named friendship island
• guy on boat coming back be careful strong current
• after back, we realize we’ve left our badmitton set there
• get halfway there to get it, and current is so strong we turn back
• current is so strong, can barely walk, can’t even swim, Marcus has to let go of his shoes
• woman in distress, ‘save’

snakes#

• japan OMTA are fun b/c amenities e.g., photo spots
• some of the best tourist caves i’ve walked through
  • these are everywhere, always seem have colored lights to draw you in
  • but these were included and enormous
• animals seemed more cramped than necessary
• but also maybe it was fine? idk zoos are weird
• warm up for japanese goods: mistranslations, lightly odd things, and a use of plastic giving korea a run for its money

Naha the city#

• a bit of a strange place — big usa military base with troubled past (link)
• no exception to island life: you need a car. one monorail we almost took but fundamentally not that useful. you want beach access!
• extreme rain, beautiful evening glow
• plus, japanese staples: narrow 8 story buildings with multiple bars on every floor
  • tried going on some weeknights. stopped by several. all completely empty.
  • for me, amazing — have some beer and play pool or throw darts in peace
  • ok, maybe have preferred like two other patrons to not feel weird

mangroves#

• really gotta make reservations early, especially with a significant drive time
• still had a nice nature walk, saw some bugs

aquarium#

• normally not crazy about aquariums
• but man, this one was amazing
• so many strange creatures! like if you really look, nature is beautiful and awesome in the literal sense, and strange in a pure sense—in how foreign the shapes and colors and behaviors are compared to use land mammals

addendum: obligatory oddities#

• photos here